Monday 30 May 2011

St. John's Newfoundland

Thank you Po and Bob for showing Christine and I around Pouch Cove and St. John's... ended our day with a drink in the Ship Inn.

Friday 27 May 2011

Shore Notes: Our Residency Exhibition in Long Studio

We sent out the invites, and we let everyone know about the upcoming exhibition in the Long Studio. Catherine found, bought and prepared shrimp - perfect, and David curated the show. The weather was sunny and warm, and I had a great time finishing off the last few drawings that made it into the show. The first two photos are the work of Bob Brink, Po's lovely husband.

Shore Notes: Susan Campbell

A satisfied OCADU student before the show!

Wednesday 25 May 2011

Drawing from Conversations in Tilting

Currently, I am going out to the heritage town of Tilting to see who I bump into. I am a stranger to this community but since the locals are so friendly, it makes conversation all the more likely, despite there being only 248 people residing here. These incidental conversations inform my drawing and I hope to somehow map out how one conversation leads to another in quick succession. Given the close-knit nature of this community, I am intrigued by how my movement through space is born out of Tilting's topography and neighborhood society.

Using aspects of what I discover in the topography and geology (rocks, land formation) of Fogo Island as well as the conversations I have with the Tilting community (subsistence, hunting and gathering, homestead farming, sealing and fishing) informs how I draw or interpret the place. Haphazard though these conversations may be, I integrate drawings I take from the physical environment with the directions I can get from locals about how to navigate their place, their community, and their heritage.

The subject matter of these conversations emerge from a shared activity: for example eating "Fish and Brewis" together, reading the book "Of Fish and Family" together, watching DVD's together, walking the gardens around Oliver's Cove together. The concept of stand-alone observer is not a familiar one here. For centuries the people of Tilting have been busy surviving so rather than sit around and talk; they involve you in the chore itself, which I find refreshing! This selection of photographs depicts some of the conversational points:

Friday 20 May 2011

Sunset on Fogo

As Marian and I make our way home along the trail from the Long Studio, this is the view we get! Marian took this photo... wow!

Punts at the Deckers

Marian and I visited with Pete and Margaret Decker to ask all about Fogo Island's walking trails, sealing traditions and punt construction. What a sight outside their home. All these boats will be used in the 2011 Punt Race. Check out the website:
The Great Fogo Island Punt Race

Thursday 19 May 2011

Lion's Den Hike

What a hike we had on Wednesday... I was exhausted but it was a great feeling to come home and sit on Catherine's porch (bridge) steps and drink her beer. I owe her one!

Wednesday 18 May 2011

Helpful Directions

Since arriving on Fogo Island, the people have been nothing but helpful in terms of finding your way to certain people and places. Everyone knows everyone here by name. After a week here, my notebook was stuffed with bits and pieces of paper that people had written on: be it a map to some place on the island or someone's contact information. Such information is the starting point of my quest whilst on the island. Important as this contact information is, on Tuesday I decided to misplace the bits and pieces along the rocky shores near Peggy's beach. Although I mapped the rock pools where I left these scraps of paper, I may loose the information with the tides. On Wednesday I returned to these spots and photographed what was left. In one instance, the note had been completely devoured by sea cockroaches, leaving nothing but 3 tiny fragments below a rock.

Monday 16 May 2011

Iceberg Hunt

You wouldn't believe the excitement about the icebergs. Anticipation is all around in the hunt for an even larger iceberg than the last one. Brimstone Head was where we sighted the first one, small on this picture, but magnificent all the same. Po and Marian contemplating the beauty.

Sunday 15 May 2011

Scientists call for experimental cull of 73,000 seals - Nova Scotia - CBC News

Scientists call for experimental cull of 73,000 seals - Nova Scotia - CBC News

Boatbuilder Frank Lane Sings

Listening to Frank Lane singing the Irish song made me slightly tearful, not sad, but contemplative for a people who missed their homeland, one that I know so well. Frank sang with a quiet pitch and gently undulating voice. The song came from his good friend, John McKenna who recently passed away.













There's a dear little Island,
The land of my dreams,
The home of the fairies,
And the blue eyed Colleens,
of music and learning,
of virtue and prayer,
And please God some day I will go over there.

Chorus:
For my Mother was born in Kerry,
My Father came over from Cork,
They taught me to love old Ireland,
Since I was able to talk,
It's the greatest, the grandest, the saintliest land,
Under God's beautiful sky,
I loved it in my baby daip,
I'll love it til I die.

You may talk of Killarney, its lakes and its dales,
Of Dublin and Wicklow its hills and its dales,
But my Mother said girlie just wait til you see,
The place I was born in,
The banks of the Lee.

(Chorus)

Sunday 8 May 2011

Why I'm in Fogo!

Having come from Ireland where I lived and worked on the coast, I saw the importance of the fishing tradition to a way of life which had existed for millennia. The decline of the industry has been well documented and it has also been accompanied by efforts to reinvigorate certain niches such as tourism activities and festivals.

The original idea is based on a comparison of the Irish curragh and the Fogo Island punt. While working on this, I became aware of a quite powerful instinctual feeling about the similarity between the structure of the punt and the anatomy of a seal. I was drawn to the idea that these two quite different objects could be related at the level of form, and that some kind of synthesis of their forms might be achieved.

Coming from a design tradition that's studio-based, the working process tends to be linear and goal-oriented. This is an opportunity for me to explore the more non-linear processes of a designer-artist. I still don't have a clear conception of what the result of the project will be, so following this instinct is a daunting and emotionally-challenging experience.

Friday 6 May 2011

Fogo Island OCADU Summer Residency

According to ancient manuscripts, in the 6th century St. Brendan and 17 monks set sail from the west coast of Ireland and made the treacherous journey to Newfoundland. They travelled in a curragh, essentially a wood-framed boat covered with sewn ox hides.

The ancient craft of curragh building can still be found hidden away in one or two pockets of western Ireland, but the curragh has long since disappeared from Newfoundland. However Newfoundlanders, including those on Fogo Island, still use a wood-framed boat known as a punt. Given that many of the early settlers in Newfoundland came from the west of Ireland, I intend to gather visual evidence for how the curragh could be the potential predecessor of the punt.



I will make a study of the evolution and life cycle of the Punt using field notes (including drawings) and documentary media, and explore the relationship with curragh building.

I am also intrigued by how the construction of a wood-framed boat shares an implicit quality in common with the seal's skeletal system. I am also conscious of the resurgence in the native boat building craft and how the Great Fogo Island Punt Race contributes to keeping this interest alive.

I see this project as relevant to my larger program of study, which considers machine aestheticism, in that it allows me to focus on the pre-industrial, craft-based methods used in boat-building by the islanders. I find it interesting that the punt, which was overshadowed by the demands of the industrialization of fish processing, has survived the commercial decline of the fishing industry and found a renewed meaning in Fogo’s sense of its own identity.