Pots, Kettles and Plates in the Dish with One Spoon Territory
Pottery and Power in the Lower Great Lakes and St. Lawrence River Basins (1600-1850)
19 November 2025, 3:00pm
Vanessa Nicholas, Concordia University
Francis Morley & Co., "Soup bowl with view of The Chaudière Bridge"
(1845-1858), earthenware with transfer print. In the collection of the Gardiner Museum (#G13.15.36) Toronto, ON.
This presentation derives from a study exploring how pottery has historically enacted and responded to the tension between Indigenous and settler relationships to land and place in the Lower Great Lake and St. Lawrence River basin. Taking an intentionally broad and malleable approach to the category of pottery, this study asserts that Huron-Wendat cooking pots, European trade kettles, Iroquoian wampum, and British transferware were important vessels for the competing cultural claims to this territory that were in tense negotiation throughout the Early Contact and Colonial periods, namely the kinship with land cultivated by Northeastern Woodlands Indigenous traditions and the dominion over land sought by Canada’s British settlers. This presentation represents part of a larger research project, Habitat: Representations of Land and Nature by Domestic Material Cultures in the Lower Great Lakes and St. Lawrence River Basins (1600-1900).
Vanessa Nicholas was recently a SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Art History at Concordia University. Her research project, Habitat: Representations of Land and Nature by Domestic Material Cultures in the Lower Great Lakes and St. Lawrence River Basins (1600-1900), considers how regional pottery, textile, and furniture traditions express cultural relationships to place and cultivate ideals of home and belonging. She earned her PhD at York University in 2021 and was the 2019 Isabel Bader Fellow in Textile Conservation and Research at the Agnes Etherington Art Centre. In addition to being Programs Coordinator for the OCAD U Student Gallery from 2010 to 2015, she has curated collection displays at the McCord Museum (2023), the Art Gallery of Ontario (2017–2018), and the Art Gallery of Sudbury (2016), and she was the on-site Exhibition Assistant for the Canadian national exhibition at the 53rd Venice Biennale curated by Barbara Fisher.
