Leisure’s Chrysalis and Butterfly

An exhibition by Meredith Carruthers and Susannah Wesley (Leisure) at Galerie Optica

April 12 – June 14, 2025

Leisure, Meredith Carruthers and Susannah Wesley, Chrysalis and Butterfly, 2025, détail. Collage et pigment sur papier. Avec l’aimable permission des artistes. | Collage and pigment on paper. Courtesy of the artists. Crédit photo : Elise Windsor

As several streams run through the sand to meet the ocean, Meredith Carruthers and Susannah Wesley (Leisure) urge multiple social, material and cultural discourses to flow together into a synergic resource. This wellspring of discourses is an alive and dynamic commons which both sustains and is cared for and renewed by many humans and non-humans. A model of artwork as relational, intimate, and living emerges from Leisure’s ongoing collaborative practice, and is offered by them here in Butterfly and Chrysalis as a possibility for future worlds.

One such stream Leisure follow is the participatory nature of art inherent to its social function. This stream redirects contemporary art’s meaning away from a predominantly contemplative experience towards a generous active engagement by visitors. As in Joseph Beuys’ vision, an artwork requires the creative energy of each gallery visitor to activate the work. Society is thus transformed and energized by the liberation of every member’s creative potential. Similarly, Leisure craft a public space for creative possibilities with various natural materials such as fired, unglazed terracotta topsy turvy vessels, water, a large pile of sand, giant rolls of cardboard, plants, household tools, and paper pulp clay. By composing a playing field of what artist and educator Simon Nicholson (son of artist Barbara Hepworth) called “loose parts” or variables to make things with, they respond to his oft cited calling to artists, architects, and city planners which asks, “why shouldn’t everyone be creative?”

In their current exhibition, this “everyone” is here channeled and centred on the very real needs of children, a minoritarian population often overlooked by contemporary art. As concerned mothers responding to their children’s ecoanxiety’s, Butterfly and Chrysalis is confluent with the contributions of Nicholson, who created Art and Environment courses and a text of the same name with his own children in mind. Cultivating therapeutic intentions, specifically the self-regulatory goals of Nature therapy, the artists provide a living landscape wherein children are guided by their physical and emotional needs for relationship, interaction, belonging, creative expression, and pleasure. Their parents or accompanying adults experience a space where mess is accepted, play is encouraged, goals are not pre-determined, and the child is the agent of her own emotional or physical self-regulation. For the adult witnesses or participants, this convalescence can also be their own relearning and reconnecting to alive, responsive, and sympathetic materials, another site of future world-building.

The artist mothers also add to the new materialist stream of engagement, which decentres the human as sole creative agent in this space of play. Collages from their ongoing research on Nicholson’s work, and composed materials installed in the gallery space, invite participants to become sensitive to the creative role of the materials themselves – water pooling earth pigments on paper, clay slabs moulding to the shape of large rocks, sand responding to the form of the hand, squishy pulp gluing assemblages together. Using these natural materials that respond readily to the child’s play, her body’s forms, movements, and creative will, the child develops intimate sensorial relationships with nature. These relationships honour the creative capacities of an alive and responsive earth, and beckon our children to follow myriad streams back to real belonging and pleasure in the great pool of creative becoming.

Author : Andrea Williamson

Leisure is a collaborative art practice founded in 2004 between Montreal-based artists Meredith Carruthers (1975) and Susannah Wesley (1976). Their research-based practice explores subjects such as feminist cultural history, working in friendship, and children’s right to creativity—particularly as an antidote to climate anxiety.

Solo exhibitions include Having Ideas by Handling Materials (Oakville Galleries, 2023), The Ceremony (Foreman Art Gallery of Bishop’s University, 2021), What is the Will of Love (Diagonale, 2020), How one becomes what one is (Musée d’art de Joliette, 2018), Conversations with Magic Forms (VU Photo, Québec, 2017), and Dualité/Dualité(Artexte, 2015).

Leisure has produced exhibitions and special projects in collaboration with various creative venues in Canada and abroad, including residencies in St. John’s (The Rooms, Terre-Neuve-Labrador, 2016); Dawson City (KIAC, Yukon, 2010); Vienne (Kunstverein das weisse haus, Austria, 2008) and Banff (Banff Centre for the Arts, Alberta, 2007). Group exhibitions include: The Secrets of the Leaning Building (Tartu Kunstimuuseum, Tartu, EE, 2024); Contemporary Kids (The Robert McLaughlin Gallery, Oshawa, ON, 2024); The Wildflower (Hafnarfjörður Centre of Culture and Fine Art, Reykjavik, Iceland, 2020); The Artist’s Studio is Her Bedroom (Contemporary Art Gallery Vancouver, BC, 2020); todo dia. Everyday (XXI International Architecture Biennale 2019 São Paulo, Brazil, 2019); In Search of Expo 67 (Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal, QC, 2017); Write Gestures (Panorama de la Friche la Belle de Mai, Marseille, FR, 2016); and The Let Down Reflex (The Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts, New York, USA, 2016). Leisure’s artwork can be found in the collections of Galerie Leonard & Bina Ellen, Montreal, The Rooms, St. John’s, NFLD, Musée d’art de Joliette, QC, and Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal. Wesley and Carruthers are currently working on a precedent setting collaborative PhD at Concordia University. Wesley and Carruthers are currently working on a precedent setting collaborative PhD at Concordia University.

Andrea Williamson is an artist, writer and teacher from Calgary, situated on Treaty 7 territory. Her work focuses on multispecies relationships of care, adoration and mutual becoming.