Canadian creativity needs a comeback

By Tori Marlan

Lately, production designer Mary Kerr [BFA/66, DLitt/2025] has been pondering how our homes are “the costume of our soul” and the “theatre of our life”—and hers, on a quiet street in Victoria, is a feast for the eyes.

It’s filled with bright colors, unusual touches (a tree rises from the kitchen floor as if the house were built around it), and artifacts from her wildly successful and inventive career. This includes dioramas of her stage productions and drawings of 26-foot-tall puppets she designed to represent women from around the world at the 1994 Commonwealth Games.

After more than 50 years and 300 productions, Kerr is taking stock of her life’s work.

“I’m finding so many people in my age decade who’ve done anything in their life are writing about it,” she says. “Because we’re trying to figure out why we were here. What was my purpose on this planet? Did I achieve it?”

When it comes to production design, she’s satisfied she did. The sole production designer to be elected to the Royal Society of Canada and to win a Molson Prize, Kerr has shunned realism on stage (it’s “boring” and “copycat”) in favour of creating “new ideas and new visions” with kinetic sculptures.

“She has transformed the worlds of theatre, ballet, opera, film, television and special events with her conceptually innovative and striking designs,” Stephen Runge, UM’s School of Art Dean, said when introducing her at the 2025 fall convocation, where she received an honorary doctorate.

“I’m very happy with it,” Kerr says of her career, which includes teaching design at the University of Victoria. “I guess I’m wondering what I’m doing next.”

When COVID pushed classes online, Kerr took a leave from UVic and never returned. Around this time, she began to feel “discouraged” by theatre. Grants disappeared. Audiences dwindled.

She says she came up in theatre during a “golden time” for design, working with just a director and lighting designer. Today, theatre tends to have separate designers for costumes, sets and sound.

“There’s little creativity in it,” she says of contemporary theatre. “It’s mostly repeating what they see in the States or what they see in road shows from Broadway or what Mirvish [Productions in Toronto] brings in.”

But even when directors request “a Mary Kerr look,” she turns them down, saying, “That isn’t the way I work.”

Kerr thrives on challenges and says she’d design for theatre again only if presented with a question she couldn’t answer: “Then I’d be intrigued.”

Kerr attributes her unconventional ways of seeing to growing up in a creative, intergenerational home. Her parents and grandmother encouraged her to pursue her interests in defiance of a culture that guided girls toward domesticity. Also contributing to her inventiveness: she didn’t go to theatre school, where, she says, “you’re trained in what people have already done.”

Instead, Kerr studied sculpture and literature at UM. She says the late English professor Judy Flynn at St. John’s College “opened my mind to thought and writing,” which primed her to work with directors, as she could hold her own analyzing a play.

The stage was always a familiar place. Her mother ran a dance school and put on annual shows. From the age of 11 Kerr taught and performed dance and baton twirling and assisted in producing these shows.

Her mother had a profound influence on her creativity in other ways too. During bedtime tuck-ins as a baby, she’d instruct Kerr to follow her fingers as they traced the edges of objects. “She trained my eye,” Kerr says, “and I think that’s one of the keys of why I see so acutely and so dimensionally.”

Her father’s job as an aeronautical engineer with Trans-Canada Air Lines came with free plane tickets. As a teenager she’d spend summers in Europe with a sketchbook, visiting galleries. Later, as a BFA student at UM, she studied to be a sculptor.

But a medieval theatre class in graduate school at the University of Toronto set her on a different path. “We had to, as a class, put on a show much the way a medieval town would put it on,” she recalls. “In other words, if you could sew or draw, you designed. And if you were bossy, you were the director, and if you were outgoing you were the actor.” Kerr could sew and draw. “So I did this show and my visual interpretation was quite unusual.”

Afterward, she was invited by the Centre for Medieval Studies to design a larger production. Soon, she was creating for a variety of stages, events and screens.

She sees herself as being in the right place at the right time and around the right people—accumulating mentors like Marshall McLuhan [BA(Hons)/33, MA/34, DLitt/67] and Northrop Frye, who inspired her, and friends and collaborators like John Candy and Danny Grossman.

“I’m lucky and grateful,” she says, adding, “You turn left and not right and something amazing can happen.”

What’s happening today is that Kerr is looking both backward and forward. She’s revisiting old work, making “proper drawings” of her sketches from early productions. She’s also reading artists’ memoirs and considering writing her own. In the meantime, she has created a website showcasing her completed works and the concepts behind them, as well as her theories about design, theatre and creativity.

Her home office houses hundreds of white binders. Some contain documentary materials she’s organizing for Canada’s national archives. Others hold family history (letters, photos, a great-grandmother’s unpublished novel), which Kerr is contemplating as source material for drawings or, perhaps, a graphic novel.

At her dining room table, she’s been making cutouts of faces in profile. “Something new is really afoot,” she says. “It’s a bit like Alice in Wonderland. I don’t know what’s going to happen. And that’s good.”

Kerr has always considered her designs as a “cultural self-portrait” and theatre as something that can heal audiences.

Now she’s actively asking herself, What can I do to be of service?

“Because I think the world is in dire straits,” she says.

She’s even entertaining a pivot to political cartooning, an idea she got while sketching guests on The Rachel Maddow Show.

Although she doesn’t quite know what’s next, the transitional phase of life she’s in is decidedly not leading to retirement. “An artist doesn’t retire,” she says, “you just make other things.”