McCurdy’s work has been widely exhibited across Canada and abroad, establishing her as a leading voice in contemporary ceramics. She has presented major solo exhibitions including The Ties That Bind at the Canadian Clay and Glass Gallery and two nationally touring exhibitions: Mothers/Daughters, originating at the Mary E. Black Gallery in Halifax, and S.O.S: Sources of Support, organized by the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia. Her retrospective, The Fabric of Clay, curated by the Burlington Art Centre, toured to Saint Mary’s University Art Gallery and the Beaverbrook Art Gallery, reinforcing her influence and legacy within Canadian craft.
Her work is represented in a significant number of public and private collections, such as the Gardiner Museum, the Royal Ontario Museum, the International Museum of Ceramics in Faenza, the Canadian Clay and Glass Gallery, the Beaverbrook Art Gallery, the Burlington Art Gallery, the Canadiana Fund, the Art Bank of Nova Scotia, and the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia. These collections highlight her enduring contribution to the field and the resonance of her work across diverse audiences.
McCurdy’s ceramics have been featured extensively in international periodicals, including Ceramics: Art and Perception, Ceramics Monthly, American Ceramics, Contact, Fusion, Arts Atlantic, and Ontario Craft. Her work continues to receive new scholarly and curatorial attention, most recently through the digital publication Craft and Craftivism: A Biographical Dictionary of Ceramic, Fibre and Glass Artists in Canada.
Recent exhibition highlights include her participation in the 2019 Marion McCain Exhibition of Contemporary Atlantic Art, the Gyeonggi International Ceramic Biennale in Korea, ALONE at Acadia University Art Gallery (2021), and CONTAINED at the Canadian Clay and Glass Gallery (2022). In 2025, she exhibited in COLLECTIVE MEMORIES at the Gardiner Museum as well as FUSION: FIREWORKS 2025 and WHAT HOLDS at Vessels + Sticks Gallery, demonstrating the continued relevance and evolution of her practice.
Throughout her career, McCurdy has explored themes of containment, memory, domesticity, and identity. Her work frequently incorporates references to textiles, patterns, stitching, surface impressions, linking clay to histories of women’s labour, craft traditions, and generational knowledge. These elements underscore her longstanding interest in how material culture embodies personal narrative and cultural lineage.
Within The Power of Objects, McCurdy’s work exemplifies how crafted forms can act as vessels of memory, resilience, metaphor, and inherited knowledge. Her pieces echo the exhibition’s emphasis on material as witness; holding traces of the maker, the histories that shaped them, and the cultural dialogues they continue to foster. Through her use of clay as a continuation of the textile language and as a carrier of domestic and intergenerational narratives, McCurdy demonstrates the potent capacity of objects to preserve, reveal, and transform the stories we inherit.
