Domestic Space/Time Travel is Maura Doyle’s formative series of hand-built ceramic sculptures—shaped using pinch and coil methods and finished with slips, underglaze, and stains—and marks a pivotal moment in the artist’s practice, emerging from her lived experience as a new parent. Working from her kitchen while caring for her young son, Doyle began replicating everyday household objects in clay: brochures, canned vegetables, toy cars, marbles, dish soap bottles, pencils, chip bags. These domestic items serve as both personal archive and conceptual intervention, challenging the conventions of artistic production tied to scale, setting, and seriousness by asserting that critical and complex art can emerge from the overlooked rhythms and materials of everyday life.
Blending humour with formal insight, Doyle’s practice resists the hierarchies of patriarchal modernism, instead celebrating the material and psychological textures of everyday life. Domestic Space/Time Travel situates Doyle within a lineage of Canadian feminist artists, such as Gathie Falk and Liz Magor, whose work bridges the intimate and the discursive. The series also gestures toward surrealist strategies and pop-inflected aesthetics, using clay as a grounding, transformative medium. Quoted in the 2014 Canadian Art article titled 'Maura Doyle’s Pots Recast Perception,' Doyle notes that "Mess like this is always better than pristine conceptualism," embracing the comic, the chaotic, and the vulnerable as potent forces for meaning making.
Maura Doyle, Domestic Space/Time Travel, 2012. Stoneware with underglaze. SFU Art Collection. Gift of the Artist, 2024.
Title
Domestic Space/Time Travel
Artist
Maura Doyle
Year
2012
Collection
SFU Art Collection
Year Acquired
2024
Related Programs
Artists
Maura Doyle (b.1973) is a contemporary Canadian female artist known for her multidisciplinary approach, incorporating ceramics, sculpture, drawing, printed-matter, video, and experimental writing into her over two decades-long artistic practice. Her work frequently employs humour and wit while also drawing attention to the unpolished and easily overlooked facets of everyday life, as well as themes of time, nature, and the human condition. She holds a BFA from Emily Carr University of Art + Design and an MFA from the University of Guelph. Her work has been presented in solo and group exhibitions at Central Art Garage (Ottawa, 2023), Pale Fire Projects (Vancouver, 2023), Contemporary Art Gallery (Vancouver, 2020), Open Studio (Toronto, 2019), Angus-Hughes Gallery (London UK, 2018), Carleton University Art Gallery (Ottawa, 2016), Dalhousie University Art Gallery (Halifax, 2015), YYZ Artists’ Outlet (Toronto, 2015), Scotiabank Nuit Blanche (Toronto, 2011), Paul Petro Contemporary Art (Toronto, 2009, 2012), Remo (Osaka, 2006), Power Plant (Toronto, 2005), White Columns (New York, 2004), and Art Metropole (Toronto, 2003). Doyle’s work is held in the collections of the City of Toronto, City of Vancouver, City of Ottawa, Fidelity Investments, TD Bank Group, RBC, Ottawa Art Gallery, and Global Affairs Canada. She has been awarded numerous grants, including from the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, and is the recipient of the 2017 K.M. Hunter Award for Visual Art. She lives and works in Ottawa / Algonquin Anishinaabeg Aki.