By Alec Bruce, Local Journalism Initiative Reporter
Guysborough Journal
GUYSBOROUGH: She spent decades at bedsides, guiding families through the most fragile hours of childhood. Now, Gerri Frager – pediatric physician turned potter and poet, whose work has been exhibited at the Craig Gallery in Dartmouth – works in clay, fire and verse. On Aug. 22, she brought those creations to Guysborough for her first appearance at an ArtWorks East event at the Cast Away Café.
Jack Leonard, president of ArtWorks East, called it “a nice visit.” Frager, he said, “shared some excerpts from her book and then used a tiny, electric wheel to demonstrate some of her pottery skills with shaping, colouring and so on.”
For Frager, who lives nearly three hours away in Spry Bay, the invitation to appear was especially meaningful. “Jack’s always been very good about asking me to put some pieces in the ArtWorks East gallery, and last year he even met me halfway in Sherbrooke, so I didn’t have to drive the distance,” she told The Journal in an interview last week.
“ArtWorks showcased some of my work after it had been exhibited at the Craig. But I’d never actually been to Guysborough myself. I thought this would be a good opportunity to make the trip, give an artist talk, show some of the process of my pottery, and read a few poems.”
She added: “ArtWorks is doing so much in the community. It’s fantastic.”
Frager is no stranger to working in full view of others, but for more than three decades it looked very different. At the IWK Health Centre in Halifax, she supported children and families through the most difficult diagnoses and treatments. The work was demanding, intimate and relentless. Art was not an escape from it so much as an extension; her practice now merges science and art.
“I have everything from intestine to brain to heart tissue, white cells, red cells,” she laughs about one of her signature series that incorporates body scans and histological images into bespoke, hand-thrown cups, saucers and serving dishes. “I call them ceramic selfies.”
Her instinct to comfort and heal through art also drove her most widely shared project. In the aftermath of the Portapique shootings of April 2020, she and members of her potters’ guild produced 3,000 clay touchstones – small, hand-held tokens meant to be carried in a pocket or rubbed like worry beads. “They went everywhere – to the RCMP, the medical examiner’s office, the hospital in Truro, schools,” she said. “The response was dramatic. Far more than I thought such a simple thing would generate.”
The project led to workshops with pediatric oncology staff at the IWK and, later, with women at a Halifax resource centre. Now, with new funding from the hospital’s hematology–oncology service, it is expanding again – into a permanent mural project. “There’ll be about 14 workshops where patients, staff, families and donors can come and make touchstones,” she explained. “We’ll put them together into murals.”
And then there’s her poetry. In her collection Ode to a Goose, 39 poems pair with her clay pieces drawn from nature, work and the personal. One verse was inspired by a young cancer patient; another has even been set to music and performed at Oxford University in England.
For Frager, art is less about categories than craft; not output, but intent. That independence lets her experiment – with coloured slips, wedged clays, crystalline glazes. “I’m just grateful I don’t have to make a living from pottery,” she said. “It would change the flavour a lot if I had to rely on sales.”
Instead, she invests what she earns into supplies and donates the rest. Proceeds from Ode to a Goose, for example, support the refugee emergency fund at the Immigrant Services Association of Nova Scotia.
For Guysborough, Frager’s visit marked the arrival of a new artistic voice, brought in by a cultural organization whose influence continues to grow. For the artist, it was another step in a journey carrying her from medicine to art, and from private practice to public expression.
Call it genre-busting – a physician who became a poet, a poet who became a potter, an artist whose work continues to break boundaries. “It’s still growing,” she said. “I love the dimensions of it all.”