Before the tragic fires of this past week, I got a chance to go down to the South Shore twice to see two art shows by highly talented, Nova Scotian women and, coincidentally, have two different servings of fish cakes.

CHESTER:

Marla Benton, whose exhibit From Table to Wall is at the Chester Arts Centre just through today, let her imagination loose on her functional pottery for a large and joyful exhibit of sculptural art.

The light-filled gallery pulses with seagull mobiles, games of ceramic coins the viewer rolls down chutes and large wall works including a school of mackerel with one fish swimming against the rest. She gives a talk today (June 4), 2 p.m., at the gallery, 60 Queen St.

For this show the Mahone Bay artist decided to explore six designs from her ceramics line: crows, mackerel, spotted fish, birds and juniper, large fish and seagulls.

“I was interested in the transformation of flat carved designs to sculptural forms,” she says in a statement. “I began to raise these designs into a sculptural aspect, the crow for example emerging from the flat plate, transformed from two dimensional to three dimensional.”

She was interested in how the pieces leap from functional to sculptural and cross over from craft to art and that is a question she asks of the viewer. What is craft and what is art? Whatever the answer — and the question has been debated for years — the show is a delight for anyone who loves art or pottery.

She takes the clouds and swooping seagulls from her functional Pooping Seagull Surface Design Vase into a fanciful mobile of a pale blue cloud with a flying seagull hanging beneath it on a spring. The viewer pulls a dowel to make it move.

Her vase of four attached seagulls shooting up with open beaks in Seagulls Begging is a delight, so full of energy and humour, while her large wall sculpture of juniper branches with birds is elegant and sensual.

Benton’s Murder of Crows is a line up of 13 black crows projecting their heads out of the wall; a few hold broken pottery in their beaks. The birds, with beady eyes and strong personalities, are sculptures re-purposing broken everyday ceramics.

It’s fun to see Benton’s motifs echoed in different forms from plates to mugs to vases, and it’s magical to play with the pieces. Her work is also compelling for her decorative use of large coloured circles like polka dots and scalloped edges, her glazing and her carving. Make sure to look at the back of her plates for fun details.

LUNENBURG:

Emily Powers, the winter 2023 artist-in-residence at the Lunenburg School of the Arts, celebrates local women in colourful, acrylic portraits full of telling objects, strong faces and bright patterns in Friends and Neighbours: A Portrait Series of Impactful Women in our Community, at the school’s 151 Montague Street Gallery.

This is a small show of five large paintings but each is full of detail and packs a punch. This artist handles paint beautifully and the way she defines her women, builds her spaces and works with multiple images is fantastic.

Lunenburg is Powers’ hometown so she knows each of these five women, whom she interviewed; for the viewer they are only identified by their first name with no biographical information.

“The women I chose to paint are but a few of the incredible folks who make this community great, showcasing a variety of different lived experiences and backgrounds,” she says. “There is so much more to Lunenburg than the UNESCO status, the beautiful buildings, and the history. This is a place where people live, and this series celebrates those who actively work to make this community better for all of us.”

One of the women is centenarian Joy Saunders who walked daily during the pandemic with funds raised going to VON Canada in Nova Scotia. Powers paints Joy with pale pink hair, pink lips, a pink turtleneck and a wonderful smock of a smattering of pink flowers and a tan dog. Springing from the loosely painted green background are images of Joy as a young woman from photographs and of her house. Powers writes on the painting “Ode to Joy.”

The colour and pattern in jazz, gospel and blues singer Pat Watson’s portrait celebrate her African-Canadian heritage, her energy and her gracious spirit in earrings, a necklace, African-inspired dress and a smock-like garment, as with Joy, populated by bright birds and beetles.

Within fishing captain Gail Atkinson’s rain jacket are buoys, trap patterns and a red ceramic vase. Atkinson, captain of the Nellie Row and leader of Nova Scotia’s first all-female lobster crew, holds a red lobster beneath her smiling face. This painting has a subdued section of two figures rowing a dory, as if they were in a MacAskill photograph of yore, harking back to Lunenburg’s tradition of fishing, and Atkinson comes from generations of fishers.

This is a series that could/should be continued. This exhibit is on view to June 12, Monday to Friday, 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. (it may be closed for the attendant’s lunch break).

FISH CAKES: As for the fish cakes I had them at the Salt Shaker Deli in Lunenburg with tomato chow and at the Kiwi Cafe in Chester with mango salsa. Both sets of fish cakes were delicious. Both restaurants were also doing a bustling business in lobster rolls, which each of my companions selected and pronounced delicious.

• Billy Elliot More Than Worth The Wait; tickets still available
• Wildlife Recovery Concert this Friday at Scotiabank Centre: tickets $20 to $200

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