DEAR UNIVERSE
Maura Doyle
The Central Gallery
September 12 to December 31, 2025
Dear Universe traces a line through two decades of practice by the multidimensional artist Maura Doyle. Tethering together the exhibition’s works of sculpture, drawing, printed matter, video, and experimental writing, is Doyle’s attention to the inelegant, the easily overlooked, and the poetic possibilities lodged in day-to-day life.
In her early work, Doyle resisted the space of the gallery and frequently developed artworks that operated outside its context. She undertook elaborate correspondence-based projects, such as her miniature mail order catalogue series with friend and collaborator Annie Dunning. She chronicled peculiar tasks, like attempting to build the world’s largest gumball or ferrying a log gnawed by a beaver through the Panama Canal. While these processes often involved commitments to absurd endeavours, they also borrowed “legitimate” instruments of circulation and presentation, such as letter-writing campaigns, documentation, and publishing. The DIY feel of these works’ physical forms, particularly as they upend presumptions of context, labour, and value, proclaim a pleasure of material exploration for its own sake.
Doyle began experimenting with clay after becoming a parent because she could do so in her kitchen while minding her small son. Alongside its nod to pop art, her first series of ceramic sculptures ¾ rough facsimiles of domestic objects ¾ enacted a subtle resistance to presumptions of how, and at what scale, a critically-engaged art practice is sustained during early motherhood. Increasingly, both Doyle’s writing and her ceramic work have been focused on the relationship between one’s inner and outer worlds. The exterior forms of Doyle’s clay sculptures often contradict their interiors. As in her earlier action-based works, these sculptures retain an element of the improvisational. Hand-formed and wood-fired in an open steel barrel, the surfaces of her pots are uniquely blackened and speckled from the soot and residue of potato chips and other salt-rich matter that is experimentally added to her kiln.
By bringing focus to the undervalued, inflating the personal to the celestial, and monumentalizing the irregular, Doyle questions how we justify what is important to ourselves and others. She scrutinizes late capitalism’s patriarchal bombast, yet at the same time proposes an earnest meditation on the brevity of human existence within the immensity of cosmic time. In so doing, Doyle validates the asking of big questions alongside trivial ones, acknowledging that both are part of what makes us human.
Organized and circulated by the Marianne and Edward Gibson Art Museum (formerly SFU Galleries) and curated by Kimberly Phillips
Maura Doyle holds a BFA from Emily Carr University of Art + Design and an MFA from the University of Guelph. Her work has been presented in solo and group exhibitions at Central Art Garage (Ottawa, 2023), Pale Fire Projects (Vancouver, 2023), Contemporary Art Gallery (Vancouver, 2020), Open Studio (Toronto, 2019), Angus-Hughes Gallery (London UK, 2018), Carleton University Art Gallery (Ottawa, 2016), Dalhousie University Art Gallery (Halifax, 2015), YYZ Artists’ Outlet (Toronto, 2014), Scotiabank Nuit Blanche, (Toronto, 2011), Paul Petro Contemporary Art (Toronto, 2009), Remo (Osaka, 2006), Power Plant (Toronto, 2005), White Columns (New York, 2004), and Art Metropole (Toronto, 2003). Doyle’s work is held in the collections of the City of Toronto, City of Vancouver, City of Ottawa, Fidelity Investments, TD Bank Group, RBC, Ottawa Art Gallery, and Global Affairs Canada. She has been awarded numerous grants, including from the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, and is the recipient of the 2017 K.M. Hunter Award for Visual Art. She lives and works in Ottawa / Algonquin Anishinaabeg Aki.
Maura Doyle
Domestic Space/Time Travel (detail), 2012
Stoneware with underglaze, found objects Dimensions variable
Photograph: John Healey
Courtesy the artist