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.

A group of over twenty middle school children pour excitedly out of the heavy glass gallery doors as curator Emily Critch, artist Daze Jefferies, and myself make our way toward Jefferies’s first major solo exhibition, stay here stay how stay at The Rooms Provincial Gallery in St. John’s. Jefferies’s joyful giggle whispers through the hard chamber of the building. 

Making our way through the entrance lit by a red light, an important signifier of sex work, we are first met not with the title wall, but a small reproduction of a print by Matthaeus Merian titled Description of the 1610 Sighting by Captain Richard Whitbourne of a Strange Creature, Possibly a Mermaid, in St. John’s Harbour, Newfoundland. Jefferies has been working with this print for the past seven years. The image first took hold of her when co-authoring Autoethnography and Feminist Theory at the Water’s Edge (2018) with Leslie Butler and mentor Sonja Boon. In her chapter “Myths: Fish,” Jefferies “situates mermaids—fish women—as openings to trans histories in Newfoundland.” Placing the print as the first work to greet viewers, Jefferies positions mermaids as “spectral trans foremothers” whose knowledge shapes an embodied and intergenerational relationality with the ocean. 

Throughout the exhibition, Jefferies continues to build her relationship with the sea as an archive that might hold memories and dreams of transfeminine and sex worker bodies. Honouring, tending to, and caring for this relationship, Jefferies confronts the ways that a colonial imaginary has shaped historical narratives of place and belonging. Throughout stay here stay how stay, this confrontation happens through the fleshy intimacy of the body, Jefferies’s familial relationships, as well as collective lived experience at the coastal margins. 

The undulating hum of Jefferies’s ambient composition when you leave me overflown fills the gallery space with waves of sonic resonance that seem to enliven the multimodal works. Fragmentary yet entangled, this exhibition includes soft sculptural works, found fabrics and materials, digital illustration, and animation. The exhibit considers fragmentation carefully, specifically the interdependence that emerges in the between spaces of such bodies. In relation with one another, these fragments form a larger conversation about pleasure, violence, joy, and loss. Fragmentation, of course, has also structured Jefferies’s encounters with the archive. Her academic and artistic works encounter archival material, including the violent erasure, narratives, and absences that the colonial record applies to transfeminine and sex worker ancestors. 

Jefferies applies several techniques to commune with and communicate these encounters. The work titled the still unfathomed, for example, presents six cod filet sculptures suspended above a found wooden tub filled with salt. As cuts of a body, the filets work to imagine the interdependent relation of outmigration slivers. 

Curator Emily Critch notes that the exhibition “presents a visually poetic archipelago of transfeminine and sex worker belonging in Newfoundland and Labrador. Responding to contemporary discourse about trans and sex worker experiences, with hope and histories held by water, an entangled narrative of care, intimacy, and resistance emerges from the coastlines” (2024). Collaboratively, Critch and Jefferies have questioned how we might hold and be held within this archipelago. 

The creation of the still unfathomed offered Jefferies an encounter with chance and the agency of the ocean, themes that were recurrent throughout the development of this exhibition. Jefferies had originally wanted to fill the antique wooden tub with water; however, the tub refused to hold it. Her desires conflicted with the water’s desires. What does honour, respect, collaboration, and listening mean in Jefferies’s relationship with the ocean? 

Working collaboratively with these desires and boundaries, Jefferies engages sea salt, both in the tub and applied in layers to the cod filets, as a means of resisting extraction and containment. These slippery conversations ask what forms of historical knowledge can or cannot be represented, grasped or evaded, denied or held. The suspended filets are playful representations of becoming multiple and a way of thinking about distant fragments that have out-migrated. Coated in layers and layers of wax and sea salt, these filets are fragile, changing, and in movement. Such impermanence is important to Jefferies’s approach to archives, for letting transfeminine and sex worker histories have autonomy. 

Jefferies had similar experiences with change and oceanic resistance in the development of the soft sculpture sea whore. Born and raised in the Bay of Exploits, Jefferies has long combed the beaches near her home and tended to the tidal gifts that speak to her. Several extraordinary, almost magical, found fabrics make their way into this exhibition, including the netting and hooked yarn components of sea whore and the magnificent stockings that are at the heart of resurfacing you torn-together. Another source of archival fragmentation, these found materials spark Jefferies’s consideration of archival encounters, the ocean as a keeper of knowledge, and her ongoing understanding of water kinships. As an archival body, the ocean makes offerings but also withholds. Exploring this tension in the creation of textile-based works, Jefferies submerged fabric under the wharf in her hometown for two months. The ocean eroded the fabric to a point of great fragility. 

What disappears against or with our desires? In the intimate creation of sea whore, Jefferies engaged with a slow process that asked her to be present in her body, submerging her hands in wax and salt, layering the body with intention and feeling. She describes the creation of soft sculpture as a way to release some of the archival experiences that she bears witness to through her research. A found piece of deep red hooked rug and a piece of netting are central components of sea whore. At once marking intimacy, beauty, sexuality, and pleasure, sea whore also asks us what refuses to be contained under the weight of historical capture in the archives as well the ways in which sex worker narratives have been shaped by violence and extraction. sea whore, however, isn’t fully enclosed by the net, as her mermaid form slips through an enclosing grasp. Putting the minority, rural body under the weight of a dominant history, the pleasure, joy, intimacy, and chance of bodily autonomy resist. 

In her triptych mixed-media work with/holding, Jefferies builds on intergenerational knowledge about absence and creation. Honouring intergenerational histories of outport visual and material practice, Jefferies considers the meeting place(s) between chosen and biological family. Paying homage to her Nan’s extensive visual and material practice, including doll making, quilting, and much more, Jefferies works to uncover a language for remembered and unremembered pasts. The hands, form, language, and presence of rural women in Newfoundland inform the core questions of with/holding, including the intergenerational cultural significance of textiles in Newfoundland and Labrador. Jefferies takes up this inheritance by crafting poetic fragments of visuality, material, and language imbued with love and consideration. For generations of rural women who did not have the language to articulate loss and grief, explaining trauma away with “bad nerves,” Jefferies plays with her Nan’s handwriting to form poetic interventions into the spaces between generations, absence, and inherited knowledge. 

Jefferies’s first major solo exhibition, stay here stay how stay, offers poetic, visual, and material interventions within the violent erasure of colonial archives. Turning to the ocean as a site of transfeminine and sex worker histories, Jefferies offers embodied and relational channels through which we might hold and be held by fragments of chosen and biological family. Working with playfulness, curiosity, and joy, Jefferies sculpts a collection of fragmentary bodies that refuse capture. 

At a curatorial talk, Junaid stated that the impetus for this exhibition came from John Akomfrah’s Vertigo Sea (also on display at The Rooms). Akomfrah’s wash of water, sound, and history takes viewers through a constantly moving ocean, asking us to consider the oceanic sublime, a space of wonder and magic, violence, destruction, and death. It’s this wash of contradiction that Junaid locates in this place now called Newfoundland and Labrador: a wash of beauty, connection, and foodways, on the one hand, and silence, violence, and haunting, on the other.

Junaid grew up in St. John’s, and she feels the city and its landscape deep in her bones. One might then reasonably expect that she would have encountered stories of Black life during her childhood. But as she observed during her curatorial talk, such stories never formed part of her girlhood education. St. John’s, and Newfoundland and Labrador more broadly speaking, have instead long been imagined as white spaces shaped by Irish and English (and to a much lesser extent French) histories.

Perhaps it’s unsurprising that the overarching theme of the exhibition is that of silence: the silence of forcibly suppressed stories alongside the silence of lost ones. What Carries Us includes not only a variety of works by artists based in Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada, and the UK, but also archival materials and archaeological artifacts. Taken together, they invite us to reflect on storytelling and identity, and on how we might imagine things differently.

The theme of silence is told perhaps most hauntingly in the form of the garments worn by a man with the initials W.H., an otherwise anonymous sailor of African heritage whose grave in Labrador emerged in the 1980s as a result of coastal erosion. The garments rest alone in a darkened room, their story a reminder that twenty percent of all British and American sailors in the early nineteenth century were black men. What brought W.H. to these shores? How long was he here? Which parts of this place had he visited? Who did he encounter along the way? How did his voice sound? What were his favourite foods? What did he do in his spare time? These are silences we can’t recover; they remain only in shadows.

Meanwhile, Shelley Miller’s Trade (2020), constructed as a series of seemingly edible blue-and-white tiles made of icing sugar, gelatin, and edible inks and arranged in the form of a patchwork tile mural, offers a material commentary on the ways that the unfree labour of enslaved Africans and their descendants in the Caribbean supported and sustained European wealth. I’ve seen such tiles in many Dutch museums over the years, often decorating fireplaces and kitchen walls. Here, however, they tell a very different story, drawing out the triangle trade that linked Newfoundland and Labrador with Africa and the Caribbean. Perhaps because of my own Dutch family histories on my father’s side (histories that tangle simultaneously with Dutch Caribbean colonial histories of slavery and indenture on my mother’s side), this piece stood out most to me. The stickiness. The sweetness. The sugar that binds oppression and wealth together, all of it captured in innocuous blue and white tiles that you can buy in any cheesy tourist shop in the Netherlands. What was the cost of sugar? asks the title of a novel by Surinamese author Cynthia McLeod. What, indeed.

But silence is not just grief-laden or mournful in this exhibition—it’s also pointed, political, and playful. Camille Turner, whose Afronautic Research Lab featured at the 2019 Bonavista Biennale, returns here, locating histories of enslavement not just in faraway Caribbean colonies but also right here in this place. If the island of Newfoundland is seen, today, as an isolated outpost, its history gestures towards a long imbrication in the Atlantic slave trade. Turner’s immersive research lab, which includes not only film but also a table filled with books, archival materials, and the tools of the archival researcher’s trade (pencils, blank paper, magnifying glasses), chronicles the nineteen slave ships constructed here and reminds us that it’s all too easy to separate ourselves from messy, oppressive histories. It also asks us to consider what it means to take up a violent inheritance.

The work of Sonia Boyce takes a playful carnivalesque approach. In “Crop Over” (2007), a two-channel video installation, she chronicles a Caribbean festival, with all the colours, music, and dancing so common to many Caribbean celebrations. But Boyce’s “Crop Over” is playfully—and pointedly—subversive. Her characters dance not just in the streets but also through houses and landmarks created as a result of the trade in slaves and sugar. Stilt-walking folk figures dressed in sequined outfits romp through formal gardens and clamber around staid sitting room furniture. They plant themselves on stone balconies and peer around corners, their presence a mocking reminder of the unruly, colourful bodies whose unfree labour made these great homes possible in the first place. In many ways, “Crop Over” reminded me of the spoken word poetry of El Jones (“Dear Benedict” in particular): it’s cheeky, spirited, pleasure-filled, parodic, and, at the same time, deeply political.

What Carries Us is not a large exhibition. And yet it packs a punch. Each element, from the archival materials to the archaeological artifacts to the artworks, offers an opening towards a reimagining and a retelling of Newfoundland and Labrador and the people who have visited its shores and called it home.

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

Commissioned by the Bonavista Biennale, Will Gill’s Green Chair was a solid steel, powder-coated, 130-pound replica of a mass-produced wooden chair that can still be found in many Newfoundland kitchens. With the help of local fisherman Ivan Russell and assistant Flo Nitzinger, it was lowered over the cliff where Gill and the team could reach it by boat and anchor it into place. Green Chair withstood months of hurricane-force winds, and winter blizzards that struck Bonavista, a small town on the Bonavista peninsula (three and a half hours northwest of St. John’s). 

The Green Chair was covered in frozen ocean spray before the sea ice tore it away in spring, but it remains the iconic image of 2017’s Bonavista Biennale.

Since then I’ve been trying to determine why my experience of the first Bonavista Biennale has stuck with me for so long. I remember telling a friend the following week that it actually worked. 

The Biennale could have looked as if the projects had been dropped in from a distant planet called Contemporary Art, but it didn’t. It could have felt as if a group of outsiders took it upon themselves to tell the story of the place to its own inhabitants, but it didn’t. The event could have pandered to its viewers by explaining the basics of performance or installation art, but it didn’t do that either. 

Instead, the Bonavista Biennale seemed, at least from my perspective as an Alberta-born, Ontario-raised, UK-educated arts writer (who has been living in St. John’s for six years), to strike a complicated balance. 

I never once overheard anyone ask why a person would want to build a steel chair in the North Atlantic or dismiss Green Chair in any way. Instead, its poetic logic seemed clear and necessary to everyone who talked about it in pubs and shops around the peninsula over that weekend, or in subsequent social media posts and newspaper coverage. The rarity of that sort of reaction to public art only dawned on me after the initial adventure of the event.

Meaningful engagement was not limited to Green Chair, but seemed to extend to the festival as a whole. A remarkable feat considering the 2017 event comprised 24 sites spanning a 100 km loop around the tip of the peninsula, ranging from provincial historic sites and public buildings to dark root cellars and open fields. Many locations were staffed by people from the communities nearby. In some cases, the attendants were able to speak to the artists about their work as they installed it, and this, in turn, led to revealing multi-layered conversations with viewers making their way around the Biennale route. 

For instance, in Keels, population 51, at the end of the road off the far side of the loop, a young man talked about parties and scout meetings he attended in a refurbished community hall where the portrait of a young Queen Elizabeth still hangs over the communal kitchen. Pages from Pam Hall’s ongoing Towards An Encyclopaedia of Local Knowledge lined the walls of the main room, and the attendant made sure to point out tables set with maps, pens and sticky notes for people to contribute their knowledge to the next volume of the project, noting some valuable points about nearby fishing spots.

Thankfully, the 2019 edition of the Biennale will include many of the same sites and a number of new locations. Again, attendants will be from local communities, and given the success of the discourses created in 2017, co-curator Catherine Beaudette wants to improve what the Biennale provides in order to create a more equitable exchange between the organization and those acting as ambassadors for it, and their own communities. Offering guided tours with more opportunities for communication between the attendants and the exhibiting artists, “making sure that we give to them as much as they give to us.”

In terms of artists, the 2019 list is an intriguing mix of Inuit, Indigenous, Newfoundland and Labrador-based, national and international, established, mid-career and emerging artists, indicating more potential for discourse. Artists like Jordan Bennett, Meagan Musseau, Camille Turner, D’Arcy Wilson, Thaddeus Holowina, Wanda Koop, Mark Igloliorte, Meghan Price, Kym Greeley, Barb Hunt and Jane Walker, and many others will expand the conversation during 2019’s Bonavista Biennale, running between August 17 – September 15, 2019.

Mark Igloliorte, an Inuk artist from the Nunatsiavut area of Labrador, will present a multi-disciplinary body of work that travels directly from the Ramp Gallery in Hamilton, New Zealand, to Bonavista. Traverse is a collection of past and present pieces that trace Igloliorte’s ongoing exploration of his culture and language through the lens of contemporary travel, recreation, geography, and the process of decolonization. In the video of a performance called Eskimo Roll, Igloliorte is in a kayak surrounded by oil tankers and container ships in English Bay, near Vancouver, attempting to complete the troublingly-titled manoeuvre. A painting called Kayak is Inuktituk for Seal Hunting Boat reveals the linguistic origins of his vessel, often perceived as mere recreational equipment. Seal Skin Neck Pillow, on the other hand, directly challenges international restrictions on sealskin products and the associated ignorance of Inuit economic realities and cultural practices through Igloliorte’s own variation on the ubiquitous piece of travel gear.  

In an intriguing pairing, Barb Hunt, an established fibre artist living in British Columbia and professor at Memorial University’s Corner Brook campus, is collaborating with Jane Walker, her former student and an emerging artist and administrator who helped organize the 2017 Biennale, and is a driving force behind the Bonavista Peninsula’s brand-new art space, Union House Arts. Hunt describes Walker as “one of the best students of my entire (23 year) career teaching visual art.” Hunt was familiar with Walker’s research on art in rural contexts in Newfoundland and the Shetland Islands and wanted to work with her on a project about loss in this province. 

“There is a way we react to gradual loss in our small communities, in towns where there are more deaths than births – more funerals than christenings,” says Walker to a local junior high art class. 

Text will be spelled out in Morse code using artificial flowers collected from outside cemeteries in the province. Housed in St. Mary’s Anglican Church in Elliston, near the Sealers’ Memorial and the Home From the Sea Interpretation Centre, there are also connections to sudden, large-scale losses like a1914 sealing disaster that took the lives of 251 people from communities nearby and prompted significant changes to regulation of the industry.

St. John’s artist Kym Greeley will present a new series of paintings based on the visual elements of driving along the Bonavista Peninsula. Eschewing the usual tropes of Newfoundland landscapes like boats, icebergs, and ocean, Greeley investigates the ways most visitors and residents actually see the places around them – through the windshield of a car. Using this fixed perspective as a frame, and images taken with the professional camera she mounts to her dashboard, paintings will play with colour, atmosphere, and subtle changes in landscape from painting to painting, recalling the slow-moving imagery of a long roadtrip. 

Toronto-based artist Meghan Price will install two projects and lead a boulder kite workshop and geo walk in conjunction with Suzanne Nacha. The two met on Fogo Island, NL when Nacha was Geologist-in-Residence with the Shorefast Foundation and Price was Artist-in-Residence at the Museum of the Flat Earth. 

In Price’s Body Rock, paper is covered with graphite rubbings that record subtle geological textures, then stitched into floating “boulders” to remind us that rock, viewed in its own timescale, is not the sedentary material we imagine, but something always in motion. 

New Balance, on the other hand, implicates consumer culture and waste in geologic time by recreating upper layers of the earth’s crust in high-tech textiles, and the foams and rubbers of athletic shoes. Price and Nacha will also participate in a GEOart symposium on August 22 and 23, organized by Discovery Aspiring Geopark Inc. – a group dedicated to securing UNESCO Global Geopark designation for the upper half of the Bonavista Peninsula.

Additional programming was recently announced and the schedule includes panel discussions, a curators’ tour, workshops in photography and natural dyes, an outdoor kiln firing, a pop-up food truck, and film screening.

The Bonavista Peninsula is a locus of regeneration with new businesses opening and young people moving to the area, despite its relatively recent decimation by the cod moratorium in 1992. Buzzwords tend to fly around coverage of new initiatives in the province – cultural tourism, sustainability, diversification – terms that often seem disconnected from the people who live the theory. 

When considering the context of the Biennale, Beaudette wonders “How do you create these new economies without destroying what’s there? How do you do it by building on what’s there and be sensitive to the area without imposing some kind of Disneyland impression? You can build on what’s there – the culture, the history, the geology – and use art as an economic stimulator and a force for social change. It’s a whole other function of art that I’m really excited about, and it’s resonating in other, similar communities.” 

Beaudette laughs when asked about the lasting effects of the 2017 Biennale, as there had once been serious discussion about whether people on the peninsula would even attempt to pronounce the word biennale. Now, she says, “it just rolls off the tongue” among her neighbours. 

Someone in the local paint shop mentioned recently that he’d visited all 25 of the 2017 sites. “That makes it meaningful. So many of these things were so fun and engaging that it inadvertently made fans of cutting-edge contemporary art. That feels productive,” says Beaudette. The fact that many local viewers had personal connections to the sites where the art was displayed meant “there was ownership there.” 

My experience as a visitor to the Bonavista Peninsula during the last Biennale felt like the best kind of road trip. I discovered places I might never have encountered and had discussions that would never have occurred otherwise. I saw and learned something new at every turn.

“There wasn’t much napping,” says Kym Greeley, as she makes us espressos as we begin our interview. She has just returned from driving across Canada, from Vancouver to St. John’s, via the Trans-Canada Highway. Greeley shared the mileage with her sister, Joann.

When her sister was driving, Greeley took photographs using a dashboard-mounted tripod, which was constructed to capture the driver’s perspective through the windshield. Then, when it was Greeley’s turn to drive, she asked her sister to press the shutter upon her request.“You were kind of forced to always pay attention to what you were looking at and what you were seeing, which was really fun,” says Greeley.

This attention is central to Greeley’s work. She is a landscape painter who observes the ways we interact with nature every day, and reflects this complexity back to the viewer. At the centre of her work is a relationship to Newfoundland and Labrador, which is continuously evolving.

Physical and visual access to the landscape changed significantly in 1966 when the Newfoundland portion of the Trans-Canada highway was completed, spanning 900 kilometres between St. John’s and Channel-Port aux Basques. Previously, the most accessible way to travel was by boat, but road access created an entirely new set of sightlines and approaches to some remote communities, carved through the wilderness.

While representations of this place can linger in a bucolic aesthetic calibrated for sale in souvenir shops—picturesque harbours, windswept cliffs and impossibly bright jellybean houses—Greeley’s paintings offer another view.

Greeley uses the car windshield as a frame, and the highway as a major compositional element in her paintings. Objects often cropped out of tourism brochures, such as road signs, guardrails and lane markings, become significant features. The aesthetic of the highway is reflected in her refined style. Like the graphics used on highway signs, each element is clear and readable. Layered together, however; they create intricate compositions and complex, open-ended narratives

Common Occurrences, Greeley’s most recent exhibition at Christina Parker Gallery, was created during a long winter. In Be Real, a reflective speed bump sign is illuminated against dark woods. There is a sharp curve in the road and snow on the shoulders. While you are reminded of the fragility of human bodies, and the destructive power of speeding cars, the hazards here seem to extend further than road safety.

Sometimes her colours are an exercise in subtlety, where a flat expanse of water meets a pale expanse of sky. Drama happens in bright white snow drifting across dark rock, or ice piled up along the shoreline. Sometimes I Feel Too Much is a stomach-fluttering vista where the ground seems to drop straight down to the North Atlantic just below the bottom of the frame. It’s the kind of image that only seems possible in winter. There is the ever-present danger of slipping, but also the delicious solitude of travel after tourist season.

Common Occurrences also focuses on another site of human intersection with the landscape – the lookout point. It Doesn’t Mean Anything at All features a rectangular sign, in silhouette at the centre of the frame, in front of a vast bay, punctuated by a pale strip of land at the horizon. There is no text visible, yet its presence indicates some interpretation, or mediation of this landscape was deemed necessary.

Greeley describes lookouts as places “that the community has designated as their optimum viewpoints.” Located conveniently off the highway, these locations present an idealized, camera-ready view of the landscape that never includes the road itself. “Most people when they get to these lookouts, don’t even exit their vehicle,” says Greeley. “They just feel satisfied by taking a picture out the windshield or out the side, and then Instagramming it or Facebooking it, to prove that they’ve visited that place. It is enough interaction for them.”

But lookouts also serve a practical purpose for those living and working in rural areas.

“The lookouts are the highest points, so those places are where you have cell service and so a lot of people travel to the spaces from their cabins, or just stop to check their phone,” says Greeley.

“We’re guilty of it, too. We go up the big hill to watch the sunset and check our emails, take a few snaps and drive back down to put the kids to bed.”

This visual mediation between human and landscape provides another framework for Greeley.

“I’m kind of interested in the technological connection through another object. The fixed compositional frame mimicking the compositional frame of your phone or your iPad, and what you’re looking at through that.”

Greeley’s frames take in more than most. They foreground interpretive panels, retain walls, view platforms and handrails. Her work illustrates more markers of human presence and human perspective on the landscape. It is these markers that remind us of our own subject position within the places we inhabit.

Greeley describes herself as “somebody whose most comfortable language is image.” She has developed a distinct vocabulary of form, texture and colour that she employs with precision, like an iconography for this place. But hers is also a poetic sensibility—using formal structure and exacting detail to explode layers of connection and meaning.

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.”

Brian Solomon and Mariana Medellin-Meinke, The NDN Way, dance performance hosted by Eastern Edge Gallery in April 2018. Photo: Ed Maruyama

To “identify” is to name something and render it visible, even if it may have been present all along. Organized by Eastern Edge Gallery, the Identify festival facilitates the gathering and sharing of traditional and contemporary artistic and cultural practices of Indigenous peoples in Newfoundland and Labrador including Mi’kmaq, Inuit, Innu, Southern Inuit of Nunatukavut and Beothuk. The Gallery describes it as a “platform for Indigenous-led conversations on self-identity, self-rediscovery and celebration of Indigenous cultures of Newfoundland and Labrador”—and it’s more than a year-long process (running from September 2017- December 2018).

Why does Eastern Edge use the term “self-rediscovery”? The answer is rooted in a complex settler-biased history that has, until recently, emphasized distance and loss when discussing Indigenous peoples. Many examples can be cited. Among them, a widely held and historically convenient belief that all Beothuk were decimated due to colonial intervention—a stance that negates many who identify now as having Beothuk ancestry. In Labrador, the people of Nunatsiavut and Nunavik (one-third of Canada’s Inuit population) were excluded from the Federal Government’s Northern Strategy in 2004, which outlined initiatives for economic development and northern sovereignty. Residential-school survivors in Labrador were also excluded from compensation provided to survivors elsewhere. In residential schools throughout the province, many Indigenous children were taught to be ashamed of their heritage.

This history is now changing as more people reclaim and celebrate their Indigeneity. With the recent establishment of the Qalipu (Mi’kmaq) nation, approximately one-fifth of Newfoundland and Labrador’s population fit the criteria for membership. So many people applied, that the Federal Government began to deny status to many people who identified as Indigenous, and revisited the terms of acceptance. In Labrador, there was only recent acknowledgement of many Labrador Indigenous groups as having status on a Federal level. To “re-discover” is to shine light upon what has always existed, while also defining its terms from within the communities themselves.

Identify launched with an exhibition titled The Lay of the Land, featuring work by Logan MacDonald, followed by Pejipuk: the winter is coming by Meagan Musseau. Both artists spoke from a position of rediscovering and redefining their Indigenous heritage, and approaching larger histories from a personal perspective while exploring key notions of memory and reactivation.

Logan MacDonald, installation detail of The Lay of the Land, October 27 – December 08, 2017, Eastern Edge Gallery.

The act of recovery was made plain through a powerful exhibition titled RECLAMATION by Mi’kmaq curator and artist Jerry Evans, who placed Indigenous artists from throughout the province in the Lieutenant Governor’s residence. A teepee was also constructed on the lawn of the residence by the St. John’s Native Friendship Centre—a significant and impactful gesture of presence and gathering. At Eastern Edge Gallery that same week, Mi’kmaq musician Joanna Barker’s curatorial debut, tet; mâni; ute|here, brought together two artists who turned their attention to everyday life in Newfoundland and Labrador. John Jeddore recorded scenes from everyday life in Miawpukek First Nation (Conne River, NL), while Melissa Tremblett passed her camera to children in her community of Sheshatshui (Labrador). Each child’s perspective was gathered in a hand-bound book with their name, and accompanied by Labrador tea dolls made by different generations.

As a curator at the provincial institution and a person of settler origin, I was humbled by the care and attention given by all involved. In particular, I was reminded of the value of sharing stories in a safe space (and the importance of listening when these stories are told). It was a lesson reinforced as Mi’kmaq artist Jordan Bennett painted his mural at the Rawlin’s Cross intersection in St. John’s. His imagery draws from Shanawdithit drawings held in The Rooms’ collections, Mi’kmaq and Beothuk canoe and paddle designs, and motifs from quill basketry. The site for the mural became a gathering space as other artists helped paint while members of the community dropped by. It remains a record of that time, in addition to altering the tone of the intersection for passersby.

A mural may last decades, but what is the lifespan of a voice? With this festival, each voice resonated. The powerful performance of NDN Way, by Brian Solomon and Mariana Medellin-Meinke, combined songs and imagery from contemporary popular culture with a voiceover by Cree storyteller Ron Evans that described Indigenous knowledge. The final event of the week celebrated throat singing by Jennie Williams and Tabitha Blake, and a performance by the all-women drum group Eastern Owl, who blend contemporary and traditional compositions.

Brian Solomon and Mariana Medellin-Meinke, The NDN Way, dance performance hosted by Eastern Edge Gallery in April 2018. Photo: Ed Maruyama

As they introduced each song, Jennie William’s baby could be heard backstage. The baby’s coos had permeated every event. Baby sounds would punctuate speeches mid-sentence, halt panel discussions in acknowledgement of her presence, and even sing along with her mother. At each event, she was passed lovingly and carefully from person to person, and kissed gently if she cried.