Notes from the Field: Working Together to Reveal Local Knowledge on Fogo and Change Islands 

Collaboration has been a key factor in Pam Hall’s work for many years, both as a scholar and as an artist.

Her latest project on Fogo Island is no exception. As Memorial University’s first Public Engagement Postdoctoral Fellow*, she spent the fall of 2014 collecting local information, ranging from fisheries and underwater mapping, to traditional crafts and foraging, with people on Fogo and Change Islands.

Her next step was to create illustrated “pages” to share that knowledge, 75 in total. She has just returned from another trip to the island, where her contributors and others have offered revisions, corrections and advice on the final product. The work is the second phase of her public art project, Towards an Encyclopedia of Local Knowledge, the first of which was a result of a two year-collaboration with communities in Bonne Bay and on the Great Northern Peninsula.

Join her as she talks about her experiences throughout the project, including insights about the challenges and opportunities of working in rural communities, and shows excerpts from the work-in-progress,. A lively conversation about the role of public engagement in art and research will follow.

This event is a part of the Engage Memorial Learning Series that runs from February to June 2015.  Information and program updates can be found on our website.

*The Public Engagement Postdoctoral Fellow is a project of Memorial University's Office of Public Engagement in partnership with the Faculty of Arts in collaboration with the Shorefast Foundation.

Pam Hall: Biography
Pam Hall is an artist, scholar, film-maker and writer whose work has been exhibited across Canada and internationally, and is represented in many corporate, private and public collections, including the National Gallery of Canada.  Her practice is interdisciplinary - Including installation, drawing, object-making, photography, film, writing, social practice and performance. 

She was the inaugural Artist-in-Residence in the Faculty of Medicine at Memorial University and spent more than two years there pursuing her research into how doctors learn to see the body.  Her work is often collaborative and for more than a decade she has undertaken socially-engaged projects with rural communities.

She has lived and worked in St. John's for more than forty years, where she recently completed her PhD at Memorial University undertaking research and creation that proposed visual art as a form of knowledge production. HouseWork(s) - a ten-year survey exhibition of her work was presented at the Rooms in 2014 and at The Kamloops Art Gallery in 2015.

For more about Hall and her work, see www.pamhall.ca

 

Register Now!