Agnes Jamieson Gallery

We are pleased to partner with Archie Stouffer Elementary School on their 3rd Annual Student Exhibition.  This exhibit provides students an opportunity to unleash their creativity through art.  Students have been asked to talk or write about their thoughts and feelings on the Earth and create a piece of artwork that reflects their innermost feelings.  All mediums are accepted.

Thank you to the Minden Hills Cultural Centre Foundation for donating $250 to be used towards the purchase of art supplies for the students.  Awards of Recognition, selected by our jury of local artists, will be handed out in several categories at the Student Artist Reception on Saturday, February 28 from 1:00 to 3:00 pm.  Refreshments will be served.  All are invited to attend.   

The exhibit will be on display in the Agnes Jamieson Gallery from February 21 to March 21.  The Gallery is open Tuesday to Saturday from 10: AM to 4:00 PM.  Admission is by donation.

This body of work began with Read’s 2018 sojourn to the high Arctic and extends themes first initiated during residencies in Newfoundland and western Ireland. The North Atlantic has long fascinated Read—an oceanic region now under acute threat from the accelerating pace of climate change. The Arctic, reacting faster than any other area on the planet, is rapidly losing permafrost, sea ice, and glaciers, changes unfolding at a speed that outstrips our ability to fully comprehend or remediate them.

Mute Eloquence of Light: Arctic Ice includes large abstract paintings on linen, drawing/paintings on Duralar, photographic close-ups of tundra, and small book works. The smaller abstract works respond directly to photographic studies of tundra microflora. Light Opens Over Water is a series of painted and drawn works on Duralar using graphite and oil. The luminous, translucent ground evokes the Arctic’s vast, nebulous distances. Through improvisation and spontaneous mark-making, Read visualizes the forces of wind and water as internally mediated, personal experiences of the high Arctic.

The exhibit will be on display in the Agnes Jamieson Gallery from March 26 to May 23.  The Artist Reception will be held on Saturday, April 11 from 1:00 PM to 3:00 PM.  Refreshments will be served.  All are welcome.

The Agnes Jamieson Gallery is open Tuesday to Saturday from 10:00 AM to 4:00 PM.  Admission is by donation.

Artist Biography 

Janet Read is a painter, musician, poet, and music educator, who grew up near Lake Simcoe.  She has sought the water’s edge ever since. Read’s roots go back to the Ottawa Valley Irish, Belfast, and County Wexford in Ireland: explaining a fondness for fiddle music, poetry, and the sea.  Residencies in Newfoundland and Ireland; and travels in the high Arctic, Norway, Iceland, and Scotland sparked a lifetime’s investigation of water as metaphor for strength and fragility, with special reference to the North Atlantic rim.

Read studied graduate Philosophy and Education at the University of Toronto.  Art studies at York and OCADU inform her practice.  Publishing credits include a poetry collection and recent work as a managing editor for the Ontario Society of Artists 150th Anniversary Book in 2022.  Her work has been exhibited at the Robert McLaughlin Gallery, Oshawa, the Varley Gallery of Markham, Art Gallery of Peterborough, Art Gallery of Northumberland, and the Whitby Station Gallery.  Her artwork can be found in public and private collections across Canada, and internationally in Australia, England and the US. 

This exhibit is a ghostly capstone for the Artist, Michèle Karch-Ackerman. It honours the wistful period of grief after the recent deaths of both her parents.

“The ancestors floated around me after my parents died. I became a conduit for my maternal and paternal aunties and uncles and grandparents dating back to the 1700’s. They tumbled out of me and onto tiny sheets of Washi paper and skidded around their new playground with splashes of white paint. They wanted to tell their own stories. They wanted me to find them. And so I did”.

The Artist has an odd connection to the writer Mary Shelley, author of Frankenstein. Her great, great, great, great grandmother Augusta Draper was a life-long friend to Edward Trelawney, who was a great friend of the Shelleys’, both Percy and Mary, and their friend Lord Byron. It was Edward who arranged the funeral of Percy Shelley on a beach in Italy after his tragic drowning death, which is forever captured in Louis Édouard Fournier’s 1889 painting The Funeral of Shelley.

The Artist reached out to Mary Shelley during this time of her grief and began an ethereal correspondence with the famous writer.

Museum of Her houses all the Artist's explorations during this sensitive time: her letters to and from Mary Shelley, the desk she wrote them on and a myriad of tiny ancestral inspired artworks honouring her maternal and paternal ancestors.

The exhibit will be on display in the Agnes Jamieson Gallery (Kirkwood Room) from May 28 to July 18.  An Artist Talk is scheduled for Saturday, June 6 from 1:00 PM to 3:00 PM.  Refreshments will be served.  All are welcome.

The Agnes Jamieson Gallery is open Tuesday to Saturday from 10:00 AM to 4:00 PM.  Admission is by donation.

Artist Biography

Michèle is a nationally recognized contemporary artist whose installations are known for inspiring viewers with their provocative and touching subject matter. Michèle’s work has been exhibited in over forty solo exhibitions at public galleries across Canada. A graduate of the Ontario College of Art and Design, she is the recipient of numerous awards from the Ontario Arts Council and Canada Council.

The Agnes Jamieson Gallery is pleased to host a mixed-media members exhibition from the Arts Council ~ Haliburton Highlands.  This exhibition is presented in partnership with the Art in Public Spaces Committee of the Arts Council ~ Haliburton Highlands, the Agnes Jamieson Gallery, and Fielding Estate Winery.

The Arts Council ~ Haliburton Highlands believes in the power of the arts to inspire, educate and bring people together.  They are a strong voice for arts and culture in the Haliburton Highlands, and drive creative development, and bridge relationships that add to the vibrancy of the community.

This exhibition is a wonderful opportunity to showcase the broad range of high-quality art being created by our members in the Haliburton Highlands.

The exhibit will be on display from May 28 to July 18 at the Agnes Jamieson Gallery.  An opening reception with the contributing Artists and members of the Arts Council is scheduled for Saturday, May 30 from 1:00 PM to 3:00 PM.  Refreshments will be served.  All are welcome.

The Agnes Jamieson Gallery is open Tuesday to Saturday from 10:00 AM to 4:00 PM.  Admission is by donation.

“I have been greatly involved in caring for my aging parents over the past few years and have seen the ravages of Alzheimers erode their memories. They are at dramatically different stages and are experiencing the disease in very different ways. And I wonder if there is a ‘beauty’ to be found in the acceptance of these losses? But I am also seeing parallels to the losses we as people are inflicting upon the natural world we are a part of, to the way we engage with one another both at home and abroad, to the way we build respectful relations. Would beautifying these losses point to how we have been seduced into accepting them? I would like to create a body of work which makes visible these losses, that attempts to shine some kind of light on them in the hopes of change.

Working from my home on the edge of the Canadian Shield on the traditional Lands and Waters of the Chippewa and Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg that are a part of Treaty 20 and the Williams Treaty, I acknowledge that these are living treaties in which we are all participants. I have found both muse and foil in this transitional landscape of stone, wood and water, making work that accepts that we are not separate from the natural world. It is here that I maintain a practice as both sculptor and functional glass blower – often traversing the line between. The waterways that spread across this land have fascinated me since I moved here in 1994 and I have found much inspiration and pleasure in following them in every season.” 

Copping’s practice has developed in two distinct directions. The first is grounded in the development and exhibition of sculpture and installation work. This work usually includes the use of glass and has transitioned from commercial galleries to public galleries as the work has increased in scale and complexity. The second direction is the blown and carved glass vessels, and very functional production glassware series.  Both aspects of Copping’s practice started their evolution around his attempts to understand our place in a world where change is the only constant. While the functional blown and carved glass vessels have become an exploration of form, surface and light, it is through the sculptural work that he has continued to examine that initial idea.

The exhibit will be on display in the Agnes Jamieson Gallery from July 23 to September 19.  The Artist Reception will be held on Saturday, July 25 from 1:00 PM to 3:00 PM.  Refreshments will be served.  All are welcome.

The Agnes Jamieson Gallery is open Tuesday to Saturday from 10:00 AM to 4:00 PM.  Admission is by donation.

Artist Biography 

Copping was an Artist-in-Residence at the Canadian Canoe Museum.  Through the work produced during this residency, he began to explore the history of Indigenous–settler relationships and to examine his own position within this legacy.  A more recent project, Resource Room, a collaboration with Anishinaabe artist Alice Olsen Williams, was an immersive installation of blown glass, textile, sound and projection in the former King George Public School in Peterborough.

Curated by Carmel Brennan, Letters to the Earth: Between Despair and Hope is a group exhibition that invites communities to participate in an ongoing conversation about the environmental crisis—one that is affecting people around the world and Canadians directly. Brennan believes that we must not only begin this conversation, but continue it, asking: How can our actions and creative practices truly make an impact today?

Through her curatorial experience, Brennan has observed that audiences respond most strongly to the creative arts when stories are shared—stories that communicate urgency, care, and meaning. To participate in Letters to the Earth, artists are asked to handwrite a personal letter to the Earth and submit it to Brennan alongside their artwork. This gesture underscores Brennan’s belief that environmental action must be personal in order to inspire real change.

Letters to the Earth will be on display at the Agnes Jamieson Gallery from September 24 to November 28.  The Artist Reception will take place on Saturday, September 26 from 1:00 PM to 3:00 PM.  Refreshments will be served.  All are welcome.

The Agnes Jamieson Gallery is open Tuesday to Saturday from 10:00 AM to 4:00 PM.  Admission is by donation.

Artist Biography

Born in Birmingham, UK, Carmel Brennan holds a master’s degree in Contemporary Art and Archaeology. A retired Visual Arts educator, she is a Past President of the Ontario Society of Artists and curated a major exhibition for the Uxbridge Artist Collective from 2009 to 2018, called Work from Heart, Mind & Hand.

In 2020, Brennan curated Beyond the Walls at the Aurora Cultural Centre, followed by The Conversation in 2021. In 2022, she curated Breath. Heart. Spirit: OSA 150 Years at the Office of the Lieutenant Governor of Ontario at Queen’s Park, Toronto.  Letters to the Earth: Between Despair and Hope has been presented at the Aurora Cultural Centre (2023), the Georgina Centre for Arts & Culture (2024), the Station Gallery in Whitby (2024), and Newmarket’s Old Town Hall (2025).