The Gardiner Museum is open seven days a week! Explore our permanent collection, discover special exhibitions, and get hands-on with clay in our studios. We look forward to welcoming you.
Discover an exhibition of new work in our lobby by members of Inspirations Studio, a unique low-barrier ceramics program in Toronto for women and gender diverse people who have experienced marginalization.
Our Joy of Ceramics fundraiser returns on October 27, featuring a presentation by Sarah Milroy, Chief Curator at the McMichael Gallery, who will talk about a work by Shary Boyle, including its many meanings and her decision to donate it. This event sells out every year!
Every object in our permanent collection can be accessed through our eMuseum portal. Learn about individual collecting areas, like Italian Maiolica or Modern and Contemporary Ceramics, or search the full collection by keyword. You'll be amazed by what you discover!
Help us continue to offer innovative and engaging exhibitions, programs, and community projects in person and online, as well as plan for the future. Please consider making a donation today.
Part of the Scotiabank CONTACT Photography Festival
This multi-media series offers a reflection on humanity’s ingenious use of nature and our interaction with the basic building blocks of material design: sand, water, and clay. From the earliest use of clay in communicating and creating functional vessels to using it to tell stories through sculpture, humans have imagined and manufactured inspiring objects to help us ease the course of our daily lives and engage us in further leaps of imagination.
Ingenuity features eight digital images of nature set in shadow boxes. Ceramic shards are applied over each landscape to prompt the viewer to reflect upon history and the complexity of our relationship with nature. While paying tribute to humanity’s cleverness and the instinct to create, learn, and progress, each piece serves as a distinct reminder that the ‘materials of ingenuity’ and the ecosystems they support are being challenged, and of the need to preserve them.
About the artist
Pam Purves is a Canadian photographer born in Guelph, Ontario. She received a Fine Art degree from the University of Guelph in 1972. Her early work in landscape photography led to large-scale soft focus works of both landscape and cityscape inspired by such artists as Uta Barth, Hiroshi Sugimoto, and Mark Rothko. Her current work derives from an interest in the roots of abstract painting in nature. Her work has been exhibited in Canada, the United States, the Caribbean, and Italy. She lives and works in the GTA, Nova Scotia, and Nevis, West Indies.
Header image courtesy Pamela Purves