Masque - Observances, Meditations by Peter Thomas & Charles Harding at Saint John Arts Centre
Photo credit: Michael Mohan
Masque – Observances, Meditations is an immersive installation I helped create in collaboration with ceramic artist and poet Peter Thomas that debuted at the Saint John Arts Centre on July 4, 2025 and ran until August 30, 2025. Together we’ve worked to bring sculpture, sound, video, and poetry into conversation—treating them not as separate elements, but as active forces that shift and transform the way we perceive material and place. Rather than presenting fixed objects, we’ve tried to make an environment where clay, light, and sound keep reshaping each other, so that every encounter feels alive and provisional.
The work connects two landscapes that matter deeply to us: Gagetown, New Brunswick, and the ancient standing stones of Callanish in Scotland. Though distant, these sites share geological and cultural resonances. In the Gagetown setting, Peter’s ceramic forms are paired with video projections that track the slow rhythms of daylight and dusk. In Callanish, the presence of ancient stones—monuments that have endured for millennia—becomes a point of departure for thinking about continuity, rupture, and the long stories embedded in place. Peter’s poetry runs through both environments like a current: fragments appear and disappear, as if memory itself were surfacing in the room. The glaze on his sculptures refracts the projections, so images break and scatter across the clay, turning static forms into a kind of slow-moving cinema.
Photo credit: Michael Mohan
Sound is my main contribution to this collaboration. I developed multichannel soundscape compositions from field recordings I gathered at both Gagetown and Callanish. These recordings blur the distance between the sites, folding them into one another through spatial diffusion. As the sound moves through the room, the sculptures seem to breathe, hum, and weather; the environment itself becomes unsettled and alive. No two experiences are quite the same—what you hear and see depends on how you move through the space, how light and sound meet on the surface of the ceramics, how your body orients itself to the work. For me, sound functions as a way of recalibrating perception, turning listening into a form of looking.
Our collaboration has been about layering—ceramic, sound, light, and language—as ways of shifting how time and place are felt. Lines of poetry come forward then dissolve, harmonics bloom and fade, shadows open and close. These cycles of presence and absence invite a slower kind of attention, something closer to how a landscape reveals itself when you spend time with it.
At its core, Masque – Observances, Meditations asks how landscapes shape our sense of belonging, and how enduring materials—stone, clay, artifact—hold memory across generations. In a moment where ecological fragility is all around us, the work offers a space for slowing down, for listening closely, and for noticing the reciprocity between body and environment. We think of the gallery as a site of rehearsal—for care, for attention, for renewing our relationships with the places and materials that sustain us.
Thanks so much to the New Brunswick Arts Board and the government of New Brunswick for making this project possible.
Photo credit: Michael Mohan
Collaborative Biographical Statement
Peter Thomas and Charles Harding are New Brunswick–based artists whose collaboration bridges ceramics, sound, video, and poetry. Together, they create interdisciplinary installations that transform material and audiovisual elements into immersive environments. Their joint project Masque – Observances, Meditations premiered at the Saint John Arts Centre on July 4, 2025, where it received praise for its vibrancy, layered depth, and merging of contemporary digital arts with traditions of fine craft.
Peter Thomas is a ceramic artist and poet with over five decades of international practice. Educated at Edinburgh College of Art and Claremont Graduate School, he has exhibited widely across Canada, the United States, and Europe. His career includes extensive teaching and leadership at the New Brunswick College of Craft and Design, as well as contributions to national and provincial arts organizations. Thomas’s ceramics often explore landscape, cultural memory, and the endurance of form, grounding his work in tactile and poetic traditions.
Charles Harding is a sound artist and composer based in Fredericton, NB. He holds a BFA in Electroacoustic Studies from Concordia University (2022) and has developed an internationally active practice in soundscape composition, field recording, and spatialized performance. His solo releases include Rain Beast (2022) and Hellsö (2024), while his collective Trajectories has presented works across Canada and Europe. Harding has been artist-in-residence at Fredericton’s Charlotte Street Arts Centre (2024–25), Sound Art Lab in Denmark (2024), and Schhh in Sweden (2025). For Masque, Harding travelled to the standing stones of Callanish, Scotland, where his video and field recording documentation became foundational to the exhibition’s audiovisual dimension.
Supported by an ArtsNB Creation Grant and Career Development Grant, Thomas and Harding continue to develop Masque as a multisensory project that engages questions of time, landscape, and memory. Their collaboration emphasizes the dialogue between material and sound, creating spaces of reflection and renewed connection to place.
Photo credit: Michael Mohan
Saint John Arts Centre
The Saint John Arts Centre is a multidisciplinary venue, dedicated to serving the community through arts, educational and cultural programming accessible to all. We strive to be an innovative showcase for all forms of creative expression and multidisciplinary thought. The Saint John Arts Centre opened in 2002, driven by a group of volunteers who sought to reopen the historic Carnegie Building as a multidisciplinary venue for the arts. The Arts Centre is dedicated to serving the community through arts, educational and cultural programming accessible to all.
