Nocturne Halifax Projects
Nova Scotia Voice of Women for Peace has been presenting participatory, creative projects for Nocturne: Art at Night since 2019. Each project invites the public to question society’s growing militarization and imagine peaceful, nonviolent alternatives together.
2025 — Lifting Peace off the Ground
This interactive community art project commemorates the 80th anniversary of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and explores the historic shadow of nuclear weapons in the light of a positive peace.
At the heart of this installation is a human-shaped shadow, representing the devastating horror and suffering experienced from the dropping of the two atomic bombs on Japan in 1945, where lives were incinerated and communities forever altered.
Butterflies are symbols of transformation, resilience, and beauty — all of which are essential if we are to rewrite the narrative toward peaceful solutions to conflict around the world.
Lifting Peace off the Ground enabled hundreds of visitors to make paper butterflies that covered a crocheted human shadow. The shadow was crocheted by a local high school student.
The project has continued to be displayed and added to at Halifax City Hall for Hiroshima and Nagasaki commemorations that also included the Hiroshima Memorial Peace Museum’s poster collection.
We are all living under the ongoing threat of nuclear mass destruction. At a time when governments are investing in projects of escalation and domination, this project calls instead for a return to diplomacy, imagination, and care.
Lifting Peace off the Ground was inspired by the late Muriel Duckworth, whose lifelong commitment to peace reminds us that ordinary people can — and must — shape extraordinary change.
During her visit to Hiroshima Peace Park in 1983, Muriel heard survivors of the bombing of Hiroshima describe how “birds and butterflies dropped out of the sky with their wings on fire.”
Can our project spark understanding of the terrible environmental impact of warfare on all species and life on Earth? Can we lean into nonviolent solutions to conflict together?
Photo Gallery: Lifting Peace off the Ground
2024 — What Floats Your Boat? A Harbour for Peace or a Harbour for War?
Nova Scotia Voice of Women for Peace teamed up with the Raging Grannies for this participatory art piece on the Halifax waterfront.
Participants were invited to make an origami boat and choose which “harbour” they wanted to float their boat in — a harbour for war or a harbour for peace.
Over 200 participants made boats and selected a harbour for peace. No one chose a harbour for war.
Canada is paying hundreds of billions of dollars for 15 warships — fossil-fuel-guzzling war machines adding to our dying oceans’ problems. Not the solutions we need. Halt the build and protect our waters!
Thank you to Rana Zaman for being the boat-building mentor for all those boat builders, kathrin winkler for conceiving and making the project, and other NSVOW members for helping to make the night such a success: Sandy Greenberg, Ann Verrall, Margaret Sagar and Linda Scherzinger.
Photo Gallery: What Floats Your Boat?
2023 — The Peace Protector Uniform
“Come and join our peace force. Our recruitment team of Raging Grannies will ‘enlist you’ in the peace force and provide materials for a project you can make on site.”
This interactive art piece was located on the Halifax waterfront during Nocturne 2023. It included a reconstructed military uniform, a recruitment office run by the Raging Grannies and an activity table.
The public were invited to be new recruits into the “Peace Force” and design their own medals for what they love and hope to protect.
Medals represented human security, housing, Indigenous perspectives, trans and nonbinary rights, diversity and inclusion, and climate mitigation through protection of oceans, forests, species and wildlife.
Many medals showed homes and families — instead of service over self, self was integral to service.
This project hopes to draw attention to peacemaking and peacekeeping roles in our everyday lives.
The Peace Protector Uniform has also been displayed at Mount Saint Vincent University in Halifax.
2019 — Extinction Shroud for the Cannons of Halifax
The public participated in assembling woven, crocheted and knitted squares into a shroud designed to cover cannons in Halifax.
We had originally planned to cover the two cannons at Province House with white peace poppies but did not get permission. However, we were not thwarted from our mission, as there are plenty of cannons displayed publicly in HRM.