Shore Time on Fogo Island

By Shannon Webb-Campbell

The biannual gathering Shore Time on Fogo Island from September 26 to 29, 2024, was more than a coming together off an island in the North Atlantic, it was an invitation to the otherworldly. Organized by Fogo Island Arts, part of the longstanding Shorefast and international residency, Shore Time brings together artists, architects, ecologists, geologists, and writers to envision possible futures on an island off an island, a place far away from faraway.

Just getting to Fogo Island is part of the experience. Arriving at the recently refurbished Gander International Airport, built in 1938 as one of the first transatlantic refuelling spots, travellers meet the newly renovated, modernist International Departures Lounge. From an exhibition of vintage furniture by German designer Klaus Nienkamper to a piece of a steel girder from the World Trade Center, a contemporary gallery, a theatre, a bar, and a gift shop, the airport is a hub for storytelling. Didactic panels take viewers through the history of the airport. The successful Broadway show Come From Away was based on Gander’s role in the aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks and the airport authority being ill-equipped to accommodate the thirty-eight passenger flights that landed in Gander on September 11, 2001. The exhibition also highlights the many famous passengers who have touched down here, like Marilyn Monroe, Frank Sinatra, Albert Einstein, and The Beatles. Fidel Castro landed here on Christmas Eve in 1972 (Gander was the refuelling stop between Cuba and the Soviet Union) and went tobogganing for the first time. 

From the airport, the journey to Fogo Island begins with an hour’s drive to Farewell Harbour. Fogo isn’t easy to get to, and for many, that’s part of the appeal. If the ferry is on time and weather conditions are fair, the ferry sails to Change Islands where it docks about twenty minutes into the crossing, before continuing on to Fogo Island. The crossing takes an hour and fifteen minutes, and on the deck is where mainlanders and islanders intersect. 

The ethos of Shorefast and Fogo Island Arts is rooted in the poetics and question of how we orient ourselves in relation to the world, the natural environment, our economies and how we connect with each other. As part of Shore Time, folks from all over the world gathered to visit studios, spark new conversations, attend lectures, share community meals of cold plates and fish cakes, and go on guided shoreline architectural walks and coastal hikes rooted in foraging, berry picking, and geology.

Shore Time’s artists and thinkers include: Zita Cobb, innkeeper and founder of Shorefast; painter Nelson White; seaweed lamp and kelp broach artist Nadine Decker; photographer and storyteller Paddy Barry; filmmaker Sharon Lockhart; architect Indy Johar; geologist Jayne Wynne; Fogo Island Inn executive chef Timothy Charles; and past and present artists-in-residence like photographer Ethan Murphy, visual artist Wong Winsome Dumalagan, food cultural historian L. Sasha Gora, and many others. Shore Time drew intrigue from folks based in Singapore, New York, Vancouver, Halifax, Toronto, Prince Edward Island, and across Newfoundland and Labrador. 

A passport-style itinerary designed by Inuk graphic designer, art director, and architect Mark Bennett emboldened the intentional poetics of Shore Time. The olive green and gold-embossed publication featured E.J. Pratt’s poem “Newfoundland,” a beloved poem of many islanders. Pratt writes: “Here the tides flow, / And here they ebb; / Not with that dull, unsinewed tread of waters / Held under bonds to move / Around unpeopled shores— / Moon-driven through a timeless circuit / Of invasion and retreat; / But with a lusty stroke of life / Pounding at stubborn gates.” Fogo Island’s remote, rugged shoreline boasts a population of 2,200 people for 260 square miles. Two pages in the program dedicated to four questions served as our cardinal directions: What do we know? What do we have? What do we miss? What do we love? 

Not only did these questions set the tone for an intersectional gathering of art, design, ecology, foodways, and economy on a small archipelago scattered off of Newfoundland, but these inquiries deepened the talks, walks, visits, and conversations throughout Shore Time. Over the duration of the gathering, I asked myself what do I know? Depending on my whereabouts on the island and the elements I faced, whether it be the land, the water, or weather, I wasn’t sure. All I knew is I felt both estranged and completely at home. What do I have? Most days, it was cold hands in need of knitted mittens and a warm heart. Certain hours, I felt I had nothing, and suddenly, I’d align with a panoramic vista and become filled with gratitude. What do I miss? This place. This island. The wind. The water. My family. The cod. The tuckamore. The 420 million years of geologic history. My mother and grandmothers’ voices. What do I love? These archipelagos. Ktaqmkuk. Every single wildflower. Mostly, while wandering around the island, I felt overwhelmed by the raw beauty of the place, on the cusp of tears. Grief-stricken by what’s been taken by colonization and the erosion of time.

Fogo Island is like the majority of Ktaqmkuk’s, or what is colonially known as Newfoundland, outport communities, being accessible only by boat. Little Fogo Islands were a fishing base for Indigenous populations and early settlers alike during the summer months. Mostly, Indigenous folks migrated elsewhere on the larger island in order to survive the winter. Being a Mi’kmaq-settler poet belonging to Flat Bay First Nation (No’kmaq Village), I noted the land acknowledgement included Shore Time’s passport-style publication: “Fogo Island being on the ancestral homelands of the Beothuk, whose culture has been lost forever as a result of colonization.” The ancestral homelands of many diverse populations of Indigenous Peoples, including Mi’kmaq, Innu, and Inuit, Newfoundland and Labrador was also ground zero for colonization. 

As 2024 marks the seventy-fifth and much-celebrated anniversary of Newfoundland and Labrador’s Confederation with Canada, Indigenous Peoples from the island of Newfoundland aren’t celebrating. At the time of Confederation in 1949, the provincial and federal governments made no provisions for the new province’s Indigenous groups. The Terms of Union, which determined how Newfoundland and Labrador would operate as a province, did not mention Indigenous people. As a result, Innu, Inuit, and Mi’kmaq people living in Newfoundland and Labrador were unable to access the same rights, programs, services, and funding the federal Indian Act made available to other Indigenous groups in Canada. The exclusion of Indigenous people in Confederation was not just a political oversight but part of a much broader and longer narrative about the depletion and absence of Indigenous people in Newfoundland and Labrador.  

Fogo Island Arts’ Shore Time programming included a talk with former Fogo Island Arts artist-in-residence Nelson White, member of Flat Bay First Nation, and a reception for Wutanmiunu – Our community, a solo exhibition depicting the beauty and joy of our Mi’kmaw community. As the didactic panel shared, Wutanminu – Our community is “a tribute to the strong networks of familial and relational ties within Indigenous communities.” White’s solo exhibition of paintings features community leaders, doctors, lawyers, and musicians and captures the community relationships and their essential roles in fostering a sense of belonging and dignity. White’s father, Elder Calvin White, has been a leader in ensuring rights and recognition for the Newfoundland Mi’kmaq. He recently published One Man’s Journey: The Mi’kmaw Revival in Ktaqmkuk (Memorial University Press, 2023), which features his son Nelson’s painting of a canoe on the cover of the book and a portrait by Nelson as his author photo.

Daily sunrise yoga in the Fogo Island Gallery at Fogo Island Inn in Joe Batt’s Arm with instructor Jennifer Charles of Seven Seasons Farms was an option for shore-goers. As I was lying on the mat in savasana with my eyes closed, I imagined White’s portraits of the potato dancers and of visual artists Jordan Bennett and Amy Malbeuf with their children, of Senator Judy White and of the teepee builders coming to life along with the pop art flowers in the background of the portraits and dancing together like a constellation forming above the building, which is perched on stilts. 

What do we know? What do we have? What do we miss? What do we love? 

After morning yoga there was an opportunity to visit local studios, art organizations, and galleries in each of the communities around the island, including Deep Bay, Fogo, Joe Batt’s Arm, and Tilting. Artists-in-residence opened their workspaces—Long Studio, Tower Studio, Bridge Studio, and Squish Studio—and local artists opened their sheds and studios for visiting hours. Each of the Fogo Island Arts studios is architecturally unique and requires a jaunt over the hill or a kilometre’s walk in and out. When I visited Ethan Murphy at Squish Studio in Tilting, he generously shared insight into his photographic process and showed negatives and prints of new work. During his three-month residency on Fogo Island, he started a new long-term project photographing the interiors of sheds. As part of Newfoundland’s culture, the shed is a gathering space, a workshop, and a refuge beyond the domesticity and confines of the house.

From enriching talks between art historian Tom McDonough and artist Danh Vo, to a Food Fishery Circle, to Zita Cobb in conversation with Indy Johar, an architect and co-founder of 00 (project00.cc) and Dark Matter, an international field laboratory focused on building institutional infrastructures for regions, towns, cities, and civic societies, Shore Time explored new approaches to community economic development and sustainability. Johar, who reminded us that we are billions of years of extraordinary unfurling, asked an important question: “How do you go from control theory to learning theory?” As a way of moving from control toward a model of care and ultimately love, Johar shared his wisdom: “The real revolution is how we imagine ourselves.”

An offshoot of Shore Time was a new installation, It’s a Trap! by artist Jason Murphy (a.k.a. The Souper) at the Red Shed in Shoal Bay, which featured two different vegan soups (a green split pea and orange ginger carrot) made and served by the artist. Murphy’s installation draws from the colours of the crab pots used as materials and also features the words “Spotless Hands and Sterling Silver Forks” drawn on the shed’s old floor in ritual salt by OK Sea Salt. As we gathered together, all bundled up in our layers of sweaters and coats outside the shed, sipping our soup on the lip of the North Atlantic, I was surprised there wasn’t a breath of wind. The weather is an unpredictable element of life on Fogo Island.

Highlighting the intersectionality of art, ecology, and the climate crisis was a visit to Liam Gillick’s “A Variability Quantifier (The Fogo Island Red Weather Station, 2022),” an artwork that functions as an operational weather station along Waterman’s Brook Trail. On this guided weather station hike, Andria Hickey, Fogo Island Arts and Shorefast Head of Programmes, and Lorie Penton, Lead Outdoor Activity Guide at Fogo Island Inn, shared insight into the weather station, the flora and fauna, as well as their own relationships to the variable weather systems on Fogo Island. Gillick’s “A Variability Quantifier (The Fogo Island Red Weather Station, 2022)” is part of the World Weather Network, set up by twenty-eight art agencies around the world, and has been acquired by the National Gallery of Canada. Due to the climate crisis, the significance of Gillick’s installation is monumental to Fogo Islanders and the larger weather network now more than ever. Prior to the installation of Gillick’s weather station, news of the weather conditions came to Fogo Island from Twillingate, known as iceberg alley, one hundred kilometres away.

Shore Time’s closing party, held at J.K. Contemporary, a fine art gallery in a restored schoolhouse originally built in 1840 that exhibits local, national, and international artists in the hub of Joe Batt’s Arm, had shore-goers wandering in the erratics together. Drawn from the Latin verb errare, “to wander,” erratic is a geologic term for nomadic boulders carried thousands of years ago by glaciers. Erratics II, a biannual group show of artists who both work and live in the erratic, featured the beautiful moonscape-like oil paintings and graphite remapping islands series of M’Liz Keefe, Erin Hunt’s colourful abstracts; photographer Karen Stentaford’s tintypes of fences in Tilting; and Bruce Pashak’s stunning, feminine portrait “Wachet Auf: Grete and the dress of life.” Wachet auf is a cantata by J.S. Bach, known by its English translation, “Sleepers Awake.” Grete is the sister of Gregor (who turns into a beetle-like insect) in Kafka’s novella The Metamorphosis. 

Erratics II highlights artists with unique ties to the place, who may not be originally from Fogo Island but have either called it home or spent an extended period of time on the island’s shores. Erratics II deeply resonated with me, and perhaps all of us who wandered to Fogo Island for Shore Time. 

Shannon Webb-Campbell is of Mi’kmaq and settler heritage. She is a member of Flat Bay First Nation (No’kmaq Village) in Ktaqmkuk/Newfoundland. Her books include: Re: Wild Her (Book*hug 2025), Lunar Tides (2022), I Am a Body of Land (2019), and Still No Word (2015), which was the recipient of Egale Canada’s Out in Print Award. Shannon holds a PhD in English/Creative Writing from the University of New Brunswick, and is the editor of Visual Arts News Magazine and Muskrat Magazine.