Jordan Art Gallery
3836 Main Street, Jordan Village, ON, Canada, L0R 1S0
May 1 – June 30, 2025
Artist Statement
The influence of place and its reflection in visual culture are central to my artistic practice. Whether expressed through ceramics or painting, my work explores the intricate relationship between people and the environments they inhabit. I am deeply curious about how landscapes-both physical and emotional-shape our sense of identity and belonging, and how these attachments become imprinted in visual imagery.
Liking in a rural environment, I am especially attuned to the dynamic connections between humans, animals, and our shared surroundings. The interplay between my domestic life and the wilderness that envelops it has become a central focus of my art. I am fascinated by how we are simultaneously connected and mutual observes of each other. This tension-being both part of and separate from-forms the conceptual foundation of my most recent work.
Installation View
Exhibition Review by Mori McCrae, Jordan Art Gallery
Having lived most of her life in rural communities, both in Newfoundland and Northern Ontario, Reed Weir’s connection to nature feels both personal and lived.
In this important exhibition of works by an artist in her prime, there remains a childlike quality which exists in the artist’s casein and oil paintings on canvas, in colour choices seemingly made on impulse which delight in the use of primary colour, but are further refined into complex harmonies.
Her stoneware sculptures have the look and feel of handwork, clumsy, yet in the hand of this master ceramicist their presence evokes a subtle and timeless tide of emotion, which they quietly, and magically share with the viewer.
They seem alive, “said a customer today, who stood before one of three stoneware figurative sculptures, and I replied: “I couldn’t agree more!”
Hair on Fire and A Flame, which are large central paintings in this exhibit use disembodied heads as an allegorical presence, afloat above a lush landscape, depicting perhaps a creator looking down upon creation.
Hands and heads figure prominently in Reed’s paintings and sculpture; hands gesture and flutter-birdlike, or, they shelter or shade the gaze, as her figure stand apart from their surroundings, depicted in the act of observation.
The choices Reed makes are intuitive and bold, layered to develop a striking anguage based in a close and long lived relationship to her materials, which use contrasts, harmonies and movement-to show us a world where humans can and still do exist with nature, a world where we are fluid and at one with our surroundings.
Reed Weir 