"From Here and From Away" on display at ICCA

Inverness County, Nova Scotia — The Inverness County Centre for the Arts is pleased to present a new exhibition by internationally recognized artist Hermine Ford, featuring a body of work inspired by more than five decades of living and creating in Cape Breton.

Ford, who divides her time between New York City and Dunvegan, has spent over fifty years returning to Cape Breton. Created in her Cape Breton studio overlooking Margaree Island, the works in this exhibition explore the relationship between observation, memory, and abstraction through a deceptively simple subject: beach pebbles gathered during walks along the shoreline below her home.

What began as informal sketching exercises evolved into a central focus of Ford's artistic practice. She discovered that the pebbles' distinctive oval forms echoed the silhouette of Margaree Island, visible each day from her studio window. Rather than depicting the stones as recognizable objects, Ford transforms them into open-ended forms that invite viewers to bring their own interpretations to the work.

"I do not present them as stones," Ford writes in her artist statement. "I want the identity of the image to be open-ended for the viewer, including myself, to experience it as ever changing, able to morph into other associations."

The exhibition also reflects Ford's long-standing interest in the relationship between realism and abstraction. Drawing on decades of artistic inquiry—from studying eelgrass on the dunes of Cape Cod to the mosaics and ancient tiles of Rome—her shaped canvases and drawings challenge conventional distinctions between representation and abstraction. Their fractured yet unified forms mirror the way Ford experiences both the natural world and human experience itself.

Born in New York in 1939, Ford studied at the Yale School of Art and Architecture before earning her BA from Antioch College. Her work has been exhibited extensively throughout the United States and internationally, with recent solo exhibitions at Nathalie Karg Gallery, Furnace–Art on Paper Archive, and the New York Studio School. In 2018, she was elected to the National Academy of Design. Her work is represented in numerous major public collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Cincinnati Museum of Art, the Yale University Art Gallery, and many others.

For Ford, exhibiting this work in Inverness County carries special significance. Created over many years in the privacy of her Cape Breton studio, the exhibition represents an opportunity to share these deeply personal works with the community that has shaped them.

Exhibition Dates: August 9th -September 6th, 2026

Opening Reception: August 9th, 2pm-4pm

https://www.invernessarts.com/