Image: Exhibition banner for ‘Wild Water’, with details of works by Barry Hodgson and Michelle Paskin. Courtesy of Earls Court Gallery, Hamilton
Earls Court Gallery in Hamilton, Ontario, will open "Wild Water", a two-person exhibition of new work by Canadian artists Barry Hodgson and Michelle Paskin, on 3 September 2026. The show runs in the main gallery at 215 Ottawa Street North through 3 October, and entry is free.
The title comes from Robin Wall Kimmerer's book "The Serviceberry", where the phrase describes freshwater that remains untouched by pollution or significant human intervention. The gallery links it to water in its natural state and to a "gift economy" in which the natural world provides freely and abundantly.
Both artists work from direct observation, travelling to lakes, rivers, shorelines and waterfalls where water still shapes ecosystems. Their paintings and pastels attend to the relationships between water, land, plants and wildlife, and the gallery frames them as records of remarkable places and as reminders of the value of healthy freshwater ecosystems, which it says are becoming increasingly rare.
Hodgson, born in 1954, grew up in Vineland Station, Ontario, and switched from biology to fine art at the University of Guelph, completing his BA in 1978. He works in oils on canvas and panel, ink, pastel and watercolour on paper, with the occasional sculpture, and landscape dominates a body of work that also takes in still life, a large group of butterfly drawings and abstract compositions. He worked as an assistant preparator while a student and later in museum roles at Guelph, the Art Gallery of Ontario, Harbourfront Gallery in Toronto and the Prairie Gallery in Grande Prairie, and spent a month as artist-in-residence at Gros Morne National Park in Newfoundland. His work is held by the Art Gallery of Guelph, the Alberta Art Foundation and the Art Gallery of Newfoundland and Labrador among others, and he is represented by Ingram Gallery in Toronto, Madrona Gallery in Victoria and Earls Court itself. He has lived in Hamilton since 1988.
Paskin trained at art college in the United Kingdom, concentrating on printmaking and photography, then worked in a photographic printing lab and as an in-house retouch artist restoring old photographs before moving into digital work. She emigrated to Canada more than twenty years ago and has run her own sign company for the past fifteen years. She paints part time from a home studio in Hamilton, working primarily in soft pastel, and traces her interest in landscape to a childhood partly spent in the hills and valleys of Shropshire in England and to a recent move to a century-old Ontario farmhouse.
An opening reception is set for Thursday 3 September, 7 to 9pm, with both artists in attendance. The gallery describes the exhibition as family friendly, fully accessible and open to groups, and says all works will also be viewable online once installed. Opening hours are Tuesday to Friday 10am to 5pm and Saturday 10am to 4pm, and the gallery has announced that it will be closed on Saturday 5 September for the Labour Day weekend. Its newsletter also flagged an intersection road closure at Ottawa Street North and Main Street East from 17 August. "Wild Water" follows "Symbols, Vessels, & The Stories", which closes on 29 August.
