Far from being a smelly nuisance, seaweed clumps and oyster beds are key to oceanic and human life and are harbingers of climate change.

Artist, curator and educator Catherine Beaudette draws attention to their ecological importance and beauty in photographs and paintings exhibited this past summer in Seaweed Bouquets & Oyster Clusters at a new gallery space in the Northumberland Fisheries Museum on Pictou’s waterfront.

Most of the luscious, gleaming seaweed bouquets – photographs of wet seaweed she discovers and arranges on a beach before the tide sweeps it all away – are from Newfoundland where Beaudette summered in Duntara on the Bonavista Peninsula for 24 years. “I’m always interested in the discarded and overlooked things, seemingly unimportant,” says Beaudette, an adjunct professor at the Ontario College of Art & Design University.

Beaudette’s often years-long series of art projects  (catherinebeaudette.com) range from photographing the interiors of abandoned Bonavista houses to “democratizing” museum collections in paintings of museum objects to going to Kefalonia, Greece, last May to build skeletal structures reminiscent of classical ruins from handmade bricks of clay, sand and Neptune grass, a carbon-dioxide-absorbing seagrass found only in the Mediterranean.

“People complain about seaweed yet it’s vital to the ecosystem and the same with oysters. They hurt your feet, but they clean the water for us. They can detoxify us.”

Beaudette places her stunning, mandala-like seaweed patterns on a black background getting rid of extraneous detail and making them iconic. In this she is influenced by 18th century naturalist and artist Mary Delany (1700-1788) whose botanical images that Delany called “paper mosaiks” are on black paper. (Beaudette loved the 2011 book, The Paper Garden: Mrs. Delany Begins Her Life’s Work at 72, by Molly Peacock, and saw Delany’s paper collages at The British Museum.)

Beaudette also collects tendrils of dried seaweed taking them back to her studio where they might sit for years before she paints them in watercolour – just as she found them – as elegant, precise studies or specimens, following in the footsteps of history’s often overlooked female naturalists and adventurers. “Seaweed is reconstituted when the tide comes in. Metaphorically I am reconstituting the dried seaweed via watercolour.”

As an artist Beaudette responds intuitively to what she sees, researches it and then adds a conceptual layer if possible. “I like that better – if there is a reason.” When she bought a house in Pictou, N.S., encouraged by an artist friend, she became fascinated by oysters. “It’s like the whole of Pictou Harbour is an oyster bed. They are all stuck together and look like little sculptures. I kept picking them up.”

She creates precise and beautiful paintings of the lines and forms of oysters on painted backgrounds in colours of sand and tan. “Sometimes a simplification occurs. Even the simplified ones are silhouettes. I am sticking to the shape.”

Beaudette explores different ways of manifesting imagery; her painting style is as vocal as the image. Sometimes the oysters are black lines under a scrubbed mass of thin charcoal paint, or the paint is a smooth and opaque base for a singular linear form.

Beaudette is a strong believer in the arts as key to economic and community health and, tempted to travel further East after getting her MFA from the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design (now NSCAD University), she arrived in Newfoundland after the Northern Cod Moratorium. As the fishery collapsed, she collaborated with others to foster a healthy cultural industry and founded the Bonavista Biennale in 2017.

In 2020 she moved from Toronto to her native Montreal; this summer she sold her Newfoundland house. “I may settle in Pictou permanently. I’m excited about its burgeoning arts community.” She recently bought an 1827 Front Street house – formerly The Pictou Men’s Club – and will re-open her Pictou Gallery 202 as the Blackadar Gallery (a nod to builder Henry Blackadar and Dutch conceptual artist Bas Jan Adar) late next summer to exhibit at least two shows a season.

“I see the gallery as my contribution, not so much to an arts renaissance, but to the transition from an industrial economy to a culturally sustainable, locally responsible, environmental and tourist friendly economy. I happen to be in the arts so that’s what I bring to the table, but I’m equally invested in town walkability, local food, responsible manufacturing, green development, hiking/cycling or other forms of low-footprint attractions – in short, a healthy ecosystem of diverse entities and activities that celebrate the local, sustainable and practical.”