In Weight, his most recent exhibition of ceramics and crochet at the Craft Council of Newfoundland and Labrador’s main gallery space (showing February 7th-March 20th, 2026),  Flaherty addresses the messaging received by a certain generation of the province’s workers—cultural and otherwise—as we came of age in the 1990s: no money, no jobs, no future, as he says in his artist statement. In the aftermath of the cod fishery’s collapse and a general re-evaluation of Newfoundland and Labradorian cultural identity vis-à-vis the rise of the Neo-Liberal world order—embodied, locally at least, by successive Liberal and Conservative governments virtually indistinguishable from one another—the thought of a half-way sustainable and/or meaningful life as an artist in the province seemed as likely as a return of the cod fishery itself. Which is to say, not very likely at all. Impossible, in fact. Yet, following where his practice led him, Flaherty (like so many) eventually returned home, building a practice and life for himself in Pasadena, on the Bonavista Peninsula.

In the context of a contemporary society wherein instant gratification, fast fashion, the supremacy of the individual, brain-rot, and disposability are defining “ethics,” Flaherty’s practice broadly, and this exhibition specifically, offer a critique and response by way of its long-term duration, its foregrounding of process over product, and in its collaboration with both artists and non-artists alike. Perhaps more than any of his peers in the province, Flaherty’s work is rooted in community, and indeed, as his jam-packed artist talk suggested, the social dimension to his practice and process is key to grasping the formal, conceptual, and political underpinnings of his work. 

The show consists of a series of crocheted pieces—coasters, tea-towels, and a (forty pound) blanket your Nan might have made—in which shards of Flaherty’s ceramic works have been embedded. The works variously gesture toward the utilitarian and the decorative, even as they formally straddle a space between simple geometric shapes, and the weirdly seaweed-like forms of vegetation found in the province’s coastal waters. While not quite unsettling—each piece is beautifully and intricately rendered—the tendrils of crocheted wool that dangle from many of the works point to a form of life in mid-evolution: referring both to more familiar craft objects, and a strange, gradually articulated shape-shift into something else entirely. That Flaherty essentially destroys his own existing work or throws and fires new pieces for no other purpose than to break them for this exhibition, is a detail that ought not be lost on the viewer. Operating out of rural Newfoundland from his studio—Wild Cove Pottery—the synthesis of the textiles with the ceramic shards suggests a comfortability with the remaking of an individual or collective past in the service of a nourishing and sustainable future. Weight is not to be missed.