Artist edition commissioned by Fogo Island Arts, 2022.

Over the past ten years I’ve been working with connections between terrestrial and celestial phenomena – sometimes a direct link between them; sometimes a possible one; and sometimes a poetic one.

Ever since my first visit to Fogo Island in 1982, I’ve been taken with its wooden wharves and fishing stages, especially the ingenuity that went into adapting each of them to the topography of their improbable locations. They’re precious and precarious in many ways, and they’re even more vulnerable now with rising sea levels and increasing storm surges.

I also admire the painted white shapes on the red stage doors – the recently painted ones as much as those that have been faded by weather and time. Historically, throughout the province, red paint was made by combining red ochre mineral pigment with some oil – either locally-produced seal oil or cod liver oil, or purchased linseed oil. Even when many colours of commercial paints became available, outbuildings continued to be painted the traditional red. A few of the most faded stages seem to be ones that were only painted with red ochre, and they still show remnants of the pigment that penetrated the wood. Prior to European settlement, red ochre was used by the Indigenous Beothuk, who applied it to their implements, canoes, clothing, and bodies.

Most of the white shapes painted on the stage doors resemble the full Moon. I became even more enthralled with these white symbols when I learned that they not only are pleasingly decorative but also have a practical function – to make the stage doors visible in the dark.

Before there were any street lights, these white shapes would have reflected light from lanterns; any moonlight they reflected created a direct link between the Moon and its symbol. I like to think of such guides helping my Fogo Island ancestors in the time before there was any electricity on the island.

I photographed the full Moon from the beginning of the Fogo Head trail, and the painted circles in the communities of Fogo, Shoal Bay, Barr’d Islands, Joe Batt’s Arm, and Tilting. Someone told me how they make the outline for the circles: “We do that with a fish prong. Just stab one point of the fish prong in the middle of the door and roll the other point around like a compass, and you got your perfect circle.”