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.

In fall of 2019, multidisciplinary artist Abbas Akhavan hung two ten-foot wide theatre curtains from a twelve-foot scaffolding on the beach in the small community of Joe Batt’s Arm on Newfoundland’s Fogo Island. The wind animated the velvet curtains, choreographing a dance between the undulating fabric and the waves in front of them, transforming the land behind flapping curtains into a stage. Every night and every morning for the duration of the installation, Akhavan climbed the scaffolding to furl and unfurl the twenty-foot wide curtains, a task that was often made more difficult by wild wind and rain, which added weight to the thick fabric. The structure was part of his site-specific exhibition and installation script for an island, which explored the overlap between the language and materials that facilitate labour and faith practices on Fogo Island and the vernacular and architecture of theatre.

I spoke to Akhavan in his Montreal studio, where he explained that script for an island, an exhibition co-curated by Alexandra McIntosh and Nicolaus Schafhausen at the Fogo Island Gallery (presented by Fogo Island Arts), was created during his third Fogo Island Arts’ residency as a response to things he had observed about the landscape and life on Fogo over the course of his culminated six months on the isolated island.

As a visiting artist making site-specific work on Fogo, it was important to Akhavan that he assume the role of neither a tourist nor an expert but something in between. He wanted to make work that was of the place but did not attempt to arrogantly reflect the islanders’ home and culture back at them. The show is a meditation on what Akhavan learned about Fogo through osmosis, through observation and casual chats over a glass of beer.

“I never went to someone’s door and asked them questions, I’m not interested in being a voyeur or extracting information, I think it’s important to just take what you’re given,” Akhavan says. “When I go to a place, I listen, I loiter, I research until I start to see a snag in the social fabric and I get hooked on something, I get stuck on it and I want to tease it out.”

During his time on the island, Akhavan noticed that much of the language and architecture used in the fishing industry on the island is also present in theatre. For example, in Newfoundland the small sheds on stilts where fish are cleaned are called stages. Stages often have a trap-door in the floor that allows people cleaning fish to let the guts fall into the ocean; Akhavan pointed out that this mechanism is similar to the pit-traps found in many theatre stages. He realized that the technology of sandbags and ropes used to operate theatre curtains are also used in sailing. He noted similar overlaps between the expression of religion on the island and the conventions of the theatre; citing the use of scripts, curtains, enactments and reveals.

When he first visited the gallery, Akhavan was struck by the fact that the large rectangular room resembled both a theatre and a church. The gallery’s ceiling is low in the back of the room where an audience’s chairs or church pews might be arranged and opens up in the back of the room, just as the ceiling above a theatre stage or church pulpit would. The gallery was lit by a small window on the second floor which Akhavan noted might have housed a lighting technician if the space were a theatre. In script for an island, he filled the window with stained glass overlay designed to look like a piece of pressboard. Light poured through collaged together slices of curved yellow, orange and brown glass. The stained-glass overlay drew attention to the strange light booth-like space, referencing a theatre as well as the stained-glass windows of churches and practical, economic method of covering a broken window that one might see in Fogo.

“Some of the visual or vernacular or aesthetic qualities of the work is very much reminiscent of what you would see on Fogo but kind of thinned out, or stretched or altered in a way to tweak it’s relationship, it’s not mimetic but it’s loyal, it’s invested,” he says, “…I’m not trying to re-represent Fogo to Fogo.”

In the gallery a slow but steady flow of water poured from the hose, collecting on a long door skin platform and eventually falling into a shallow pool on the floor. The water is reminiscent of the continuous circulation of water Akhavan noticed in fish plants in the area, however it is also a reference to how colonialism has shaped life on the island.

Akhavan has explored gardens as a method of colonial control over both nature and people in his past works. He explained that in script for an island the garden hose can also be read as the slithering snake in the garden of eden, implying that narratives about Fogo often falsely represent the pre-contact island as an edenic, uninhabited space – erasing the histories of Indigenous peoples who inhabited the island. While also referencing the important role that religion played in forming settler communities on the island. Akhavan piped the sound of a flag jangling against a pole into the gallery, as a reminder that the ongoing effects of colonialism continue to resonate throughout modern Fogo.

One week before Akhavan disassembled the installation on the beach, the gallery portion of script for an island opened. The staggered timing of the openings helped create the purgatorial feeling that permeated script for an island. The sculpture on the beach gave viewers the feeling that they were looking at the remnants of a performance that had already happened or a space that was being prepared for a future performance.

Similarly, in the gallery every twenty minutes the garden hose mounted to the wall would uncoil and recoil creating the sensation that something was either finishing or beginning. The in-between-time atmosphere of the show contributed to the reflective feeling of the work. Script for an island invites viewers to contemplate the correlations between the vernacular and architecture of theatre and of work and faith on Fogo but it refuses to ascribe an easily definable meaning to these parallels.

“My interest is in highlighting these correlations between fishing and boat building and theatre and religion, they seem to necessitate each other’s ecology in some way,” he says. “They give way to a particular kind of aesthetic and this utilitarian way of living and making and believing.”

Apart from a year in grad school and some travelling here and there, I have lived in Newfoundland my entire life. From kindergarten to my BFA at Grenfell Campus, Memorial University, my art education is grounded here. I never applied anywhere else – the thought of applying to an art school in mainland Canada made me feel embarrassed of my Newfoundlandness. I had rejected myself before any school had the chance to. In some ways, I still carry that feeling.

Fresh out of art school, I took a job serving tables at the Fogo Island Inn – a prestigious hotel in Joe Batt’s Arm, Newfoundland. It was exciting to go somewhere in Newfoundland outside of St. John’s that was actively making space for contemporary art through the Fogo Island Arts program. My imagination of Fogo Island was a place of exchange, site-specific art education through accessible dialogue and experience – an island of opportunity, right here in my home province.

Very few Newfoundland artists have participated in the Fogo Island Arts residency program. In fact, my understanding of the program was that it was simply not accessible to Newfoundland artists. Artists-in-Residence from everywhere-but-here were granted permission to work with aesthetic of Newfoundlandia, privileged to make work in and about this place without fear of being irrelevant, non-contemporary, or inaccessible to a Canadian or international audience. The capital lies in the international names that show up for the experience and leave their stamp behind – in the gallery or studios, lecture theatre, shop, the Fogo Island Inn guestbook (even if only rumoured). This strategy will keep people coming, but as an emerging Newfoundland artist, what I hear is: good art comes from away.

Will Gill came from away 22 years ago and never left. He came for an opportunity and built more opportunities in order to stay. His practice has become rooted here, and his sensitivity to this place is ever-present. For those reasons, I consider him a Newfoundland artist. The first time I learned about Gill’s practice was at my elementary school, where he occasionally facilitated projects through ArtsSmarts program [1]. 15 years later when I heard he had been selected for a Fogo Island Arts residency, I felt a burst of pride. The same dramatic excitement that my teenage self felt when Newfoundlanders made it to the Canadian Idol stage: pride of representation. Pride of I know him and I trust him. I wanted to see work emerging from the Fogo Island Arts platform that was contributing to a Newfoundland art history that had grown here. With Gill as an artist-in-residence, I knew that would happen.

In June, From The Lion’s Den, an exhibition of Gill’s work from his residency on Fogo Island, opened at Christina Parker Gallery in St. John’s. A catalogue of the same name accompanies the exhibition in collaboration with the gallery and Nothing New Projects, with essays by Alexandra McIntosh (Fogo Island Arts) and the artist.

The exhibition pulls together Gill’s diverse practice through sculpture; textiles; photography; drawing, consisting of six large tarps with charcoal (made by Gill on the island) drawings overlaid with sewed silk shapes; two sculptures; and seven narrative photographs. The body of work is a reminder of how people and place adapt in the face of change. Working in direct response to the land, sea, built environment, and people of Fogo Island, it is a commentary on the nature of preservation and finding balance between progress, community agency, and holding tradition close. Having a relationship with Fogo Island, the imagery resonated with me. I recognized the silk ‘EXCEL LOL 143,’ the old Orangemen’s Lodge, later (but no longer) home to Winds and Waves Artisans’ Guild, where I learned to hook rugs; a local code that would only be known to islanders and observant visitors. When I see the tower studio rendered in silk, I think of Shoal Bay. I think of the tide and the colour of the rocks. I think of spaceships and of arrivals.

In a series of seven high-contrast photographs, Gill tells the story of an arrival. An unidentified group of three rows to the shore of the Lion’s Den [2]. They arrive at night and set up camp. They hang their clothes to dry as the calm and the sun returns. The series is a portrait of migration, arriving to the unknown, and cycles of place. The final image communicates a feeling of ease and of permanence; the trio has hung their hats in the cove. We wonder where they might have come from, but know they have found safety in this place.

Gill’s interpretation of a traditional Fogo Island fishing stage, Fantastic Stage, sits haphazardly intricate yet sturdy. The clean lines of the U-shaped pale pink plinth starkly frame the inner workings of delicate wooden sculpture. It reminds me of the Shorefast Foundation and its relationship to traditional life on Fogo Island. I wonder whether the stage could support itself without the plinth. Preservers – a series of plaster cast buckets and mason jars – sits on a nearby low plinth and I think about what is really being preserved within this exhibition.

Fogo Island is a place of contrast: a traditional culture sitting in the palm of an international market. Cycles of place are inevitable, but who dictates the progress? How do we measure its success? From the Lion’s Den illustrates this moment of in-betweeness on Fogo Island, a progress shot of sorts. Gill pulls together his diverse and sometimes disparate practices in a way that emulates islandness and the ways in which we respond to place towards liveability. 

Ten years ago, Argentinian-Canadian artist Pepa Chan arrived in St. John’s after hitchhiking across Canada. She has been practicing art in the province ever since. For a month during the summer of 2017, Chan spent five days a week at an abandoned house in Port Union, NL. Chan, along with artists Kailey Bryan and Mimi Stockland, installed a surreal site-specific exhibition in the house filling it with plush toys, textile work, sculpture, and video installations. Fringe to the inaugural Bonavista Biennale, the collaborative installation Grass in the Sky saw traffic from peninsula-wide art tourism and local residents alike. The installation responded to themes of home and abandonment, physically and emotionally.

Chan opened the house to the public, speaking with visitors intrigued by what became locally known as “The Teddybear House.” Chan’s presence in the house amongst the art was integral to the success of the project. Her occupancy established the house as a gathering space, embedding a new narrative in the house. She welcomed people passing through and local residents, with regular visits from a child who lives nearby. The abandoned house was alive again, even if just for a month.

Chan’s grassroots methods and playfully dark themes relate to place and community through individual moments. She confronts familiar spaces with situations of unexpected intimacy: moving to Port Union for a month or brushing and collecting visitors’ hair during her recent Elbow Room residency at The Rooms. By building relationships with Newfoundland through art interventions, and in turn through people, Chan’s practice is a long-term gesture to know this place in new ways. Chan’s work reminds me of a funhouse – she shifts our perspective of ourselves, of our place, and in doing so a critical mirror becomes visible. Much like Gill, Chan’s sensitivity to place and continued practice on the island is a notable contribution to a larger Newfoundland art history discourse.

Last year I gave a guest lecture to visual arts students at Grenfell Campus. I spoke about my research, my practice, and why I choose to stay in Newfoundland. Towards the end, I asked for a show of hands, “Who wants to leave Newfoundland after graduation?” All hands went up, every student in the room. This left me feeling sad until I reminded myself that I left, that I too felt that I needed to leave. My professors told me that I should leave. And actually, leaving was good for me. I probed the class with another question, “Why do you want to leave?”

There’s no opportunity here.

My work isn’t about Newfoundland.

I don’t want to be categorized as a ‘Newfoundland artist’

I think to myself: good art goes away.

In April, Newfoundland artist Mike Gough – currently based in Ottawa – presented a new body of work at Jones’ Gallery in Saint John, NB. Certainty of Tides responds to the impermanence of memories and narratives of “love, distance, and adaptation to change.” Gough’s work expands on themes present in Gill and Chan’s work relating to impermanence, cycles of place, and feelings of home. In addition to 15 large landscape paintings, 16 smaller paintings illustrate the Four Quartets, a set of four poems written by T. S. Eliot. Where you are is where you are not, Gough illustrates a wintery exterior that feels all too distant – a yearning for Newfoundland that is obvious and sentimentally idealized. I think again of this place – another one longs. The paintings contrast his typical open landscapes, confining them to window views. Gough’s signature style lacks detail – a blur of moments that may be remembered. 

I think about how I felt when I left for grad school, desperate to graduate from Newfoundland artist to Canadian or “International” artist. In Glasgow, I felt permission to make work about Newfoundland, to write about it, to critically consider my place within it. Removing myself from preconceived ideas of The Newfoundlander helped me develop my voice and confidence in my place identity. I think about Gough making new work in Ottawa, imagining Newfoundland landscapes and moments that have passed. While he has left, he is still here – I know that feeling. In contrast to longing for a former life, Gill and Chan are forging ongoing connections and narratives in Newfoundland.  

As part of the research for some new work, I facilitated a conversation with the junior high students at St. Mark’s School in King’s Cove, about a 35-minute drive from my home in Bonavista. The school is K-12, with 34 students total – about 165 fewer than there was ten years ago. We talked about art, opportunity, and the big question: should we stay? Towards the end of the class, I asked them: How do we balance our feelings of loss and hope in our small communities: what makes us notice hope and what makes us notice loss? One student spoke about the way she feels in the summer when the usually-empty homes are lit up with families home for the summer, and how she feels when the houses fall quiet and dark again in the fall. 

There is no exclusive formula that dictates whether a person is a Newfoundland artist. There is no set milestone one must reach to attain such title. For me, it’s simple: does this artist have a lasting and respectful relationship with this place? Do they speak with the place rather than at the place? Do they want to be here? Yes, some good art comes from away, and the best-case scenario is that those artists stay and continue to grow here. Not just when it’s summer holidays or term-time, and not just for residencies. I am part of a generation that has been “learning to leave” since birth. I now know that good art also grows from here, without the need for outside validation. We need to start teaching to stay and build new place-specific supports for that to be possible. 

In new works at Christina Parker Gallery, Gough’s Nocturnal Series draws attention to domestic light in the dead of night: light coming through a window, a fire pit. I am reminded of Chan sitting on the front steps of the Teddybear House, next to the old generator grumbling to keep the projectors running. I think of Gill’s trio of migrants arriving at Lion’s Den, the light meeting their clothes in the morning. I think: the lights are on and we are making good art here. 

[1] Newfoundland and Labrador Arts Council funding program for curriculum-immersed art programs in schools delivered by professional artists

[2] Lion’s Den is a sheltered cove on Fogo Island of about 50 people that was voluntarily resettled in the 1950s

What does art have to do with the price of fish? The answer is not obvious to those who have never depended on a fishing economy. The collapse of the cod fishing industry in the `90’s was disastrous to the inhabitants of Fogo Island, Newfoundland, causing need for a new vision of prosperity. In response to this need, social entrepreneur Zita Cobb has developed Shorefast, an organization which oversees a cluster of social businesses and charitable organizations on the island.

On November 12, 2018 Art Speaks hosted a public talk at Concordia University featuring Cobb. Cobb, who formerly worked in finance, moved back to her home of Fogo Island in the early 2000s. Along with her brothers Anthony and Alan, she set out to apply her professional skills in a place where inhabitants work from the principles of social and ecological logic rather than the logic of money. Cobb’s presentation focused on the ways in which she has envisioned and implemented programing that centers art as a means of developing lasting prosperity for the people of Fogo Island.

Her methodology, although globally networked, is deeply committed to a geographical and embodied conception of community, “where people understand that they have a shared fate.” She opened the talk by saying: “Every time I say Fogo Island, I expect that you’re going to fill in the name of a community that means something to you. And if you don’t have one, I highly recommend that you get one because community is a kind of lens through which we can see hope.”

Poignantly, she stated that humanity is experiencing a “crisis of belonging,” generated by the privileging of financial value over intrinsic value. The answer to this dilemma, according to Cobb, is through art.

Cobb explained that the relationship between art and economic renewal on Fogo Island began when Colin Low traveled there in the mid-sixties to make a series for videos for the National Film Board. When Low arrived, his novel perspective sparked constructive dialogue with the locals. These exchanges prompted the fishers to build larger boats to access mid-shore fishing, which eventually lead to the creation of the cooperative business, Fogo Island Co-operative Society Limited. The ability for art to facilitate creative problem-solving is foundational to Cobb’s current work in asset-based community development.

Unlike standard economic development, Cobb illustrates an arts-and community-centered approach can only move at the “speed of human trust,” which means that it presents unique barriers. When Cobb and her brothers pitched their proposal to the provincial and federal governments for funding assistance, they heard back that the idea was “not normal, practical, reasonable, or rational.” Cobb said that this was the moment that concretized her faith in Shorefast, which was formed in 2006 and has been an overwhelming success since.

To date, Shorefast oversees several social businesses which are Fogo Island Inn, Fogo Island Shop, and Fogo Island Fish. These revenue-generating businesses have been developed to work in concert with Shorefast’s other programing. They have a practice of “economic nutrition labelling,” inspired by nutrition labeling on food. These labels are a breakdown of revenue distribution, illustrating how money is circulated locally and invested in further development via Shorefast’s nine charitable organizations. Notably, one of these organizations is Fogo Island Arts which includes an artist residency program and exhibition venue located in Fogo Island Inn. All the work overseen by Shorefast, such as Todd Saunders’ architectural designs of the Fogo Island Arts studios and Fogo Island Inn, is incredibly responsive to the traditions of local craft and vernacular building. These initiatives are fully integrated into the social fabric of Fogo Island.

Artists in residence live amongst the community, engaging deeply with the local experiential, tacit, and oral knowledges, in a mutually beneficial exchange of ideas and skills. Similarly, Fogo Island Shop offers the opportunity for local craftspeople to create and sell their work in collaboration with designers, which included furnishing and decorating the entirety of Fogo Island Inn. What is learned through “the Fogo process” is shared internationally through Fogo Island Dialogues, a series of international conferences and publications that reflect on the happenings of Fogo Island Arts.

Although Cobb’s vision for the reinvigoration of Fogo Island is profoundly local, the lessons that can be gleaned from her approach can be implemented in other contexts. Through this method, leaders must remain focused on shared values and goals, remembering “the most important thing is to keep the most important thing the most important thing.” It is with this deep awareness for one’s priorities and place that one may successfully serve their community through art. In closing, Cobb remarked, “the only place that can’t be saved is the place that no one loves.”