A quiet, almost meditative landscape spreads out in the pavilion of the Winkelriedhaus. It smells of wood and earth, smoke and sun. For her exhibition gathering, Maude Léonard-Contant transforms the space into a poetic field of remembrance and change - a place where the visible and the ephemeral resonate with one another.

The Canadian-Swiss artist, who was awarded the Frey-Näpflin Foundation's Year of Work in 2024, has created a series of fragile objects in close collaboration with Entlebuch charcoal burner Doris Wicki: charred fragments of wood from trees that could no longer withstand the storms after hot summers. These forms, burnt into fine charcoal and as light as they are vulnerable, bear witness to a transformation - from the life force of nature to its return to the cycle of the elements.

Maude Léonard-Contant at the vernissage of her exhibition, photo: Christian Hartmann

Léonard-Contant combines the objects with materials that are symbolically charged: Sweet grasses, ceramics, glass, jade, salt lick, matcha tea, lime, ash. Everything in this cycle of works bears traces of warmth, pressure and change - of processes that shape life itself. Words also flow into her works: short texts, memories, poetic thoughts that interweave the visible with the spiritual. The result is a fragile topography of gratitude and grief, a tender declaration of love to the world and its constant transformation.
gathering is not an exhibition in the classic sense, but an invitation to pause for a moment. It tells of loss and renewal, of passing and persistence in a different form. Léonard-Contant's works, created as part of her year of work, are deeply rooted in the theme of letting go - and at the same time open our eyes to a form of connectedness that encompasses all living things.
The exhibition creates a space of togetherness in which remembering, feeling and perceiving merge into one another. Between wood, light and shadow, there is a quiet consolation: that everything that passes away returns in a new form.
At the end of this intensive examination, the accompanying publication gathering will be published and presented on February 1, 2026, at the finissage in the Nidwalden Museum. Edited by the museum and published by Scheidegger & Spiess, the book provides an insight into Léonard-Contant's artistic practice and documents her series of four installations, which comes to a close with the exhibition at the Winkelriedhaus. It is a work that is as sensual as it is intellectual, making the processes of collecting, connecting and decaying visible - an artistic document that preserves the ephemeral.
October 25, 2025 to February 1, 2026
www.nidwaldner-museum.ch