Sharon Lockhart, still from WINDWARD, 2025. Co-commissioned and co-produced by Shorefast/Fogo Island Arts, The Vega Foundation, and the National Gallery of Canada, with the support of The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery and Walter Phillips Gallery, Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity. Courtesy the artist and neugerriemschneider, Berlin. © Sharon Lockhart, 2025
SHARON LOCKHART
October 22, 2025 - January 7, 2026
Over the course of four summers spent on Newfoundland’s Fogo Island, at Canada’s easternmost reaches, Sharon Lockhart developed a new film and a series of photographs building upon core themes that have defined her career: an exploration of place and how people engage with landscapes, a durational approach to attention through extended static takes, and a long-term commitment to those who appear before her lens. This exhibition features her film installation, WINDWARD, in which the island’s striking geological formations, unique climate, and austere beauty are brought to life. The presentation also debuts her photographs, entitled Fogo Island Portrait Studio, picturing the island’s young residents.
During her 2022 residency with Fogo Island Arts, Lockhart encountered Colin Low’s film The Children of Fogo Island, which documented youth as they played, built and interacted in harmony with their community and environment. With Low’s work as a symbol of Fogo’s past, Lockhart created WINDWARD. A filmic exploration of the site’s present, this new work sees time as it shifts and envelops, surging and calming in pace with the ever-present winds that shape life on Fogo.
In WINDWARD, Lockhart carefully observes the island’s geography, capturing its youth in structured play amid fields of tall grass, volcanic rocks, and crashing waves. Through her lens, the sea, sky, land, light, and weather become essential in shaping a narrative across her subtly composed tableaux. Filmed on the island’s northern face—its windward end—the work takes cues from an unseen force: persistent gusts that descend uninterrupted from the Arctic, arriving on land as a presence inseparable from daily life. An inherited attunement to the environment, the ability to read and heed it, allows Lockhart’s subjects to enter into close exchange with their surroundings. Vastness takes hold as figures are made minute by their world. Moving in and out of sight, crossing the picture plane, the children of WINDWARD occupy Lockhart’s frames entirely, activating and informing their geography in scenes composed and choreographed for the camera. In concert with the film’s surging winds, balanced by moments of intense reprieve, Fogo Island’s elemental essence and its residents’ profound connection to the natural is brought to light.
The artist has also produced a series of photographs entitled Fogo Island Portrait Studio. The results of an open invitation extended by the artist, the images see the island’s children in static confrontations with the camera. Here, Lockhart presents her subjects in daylit portraits, their proximity countering their depiction in WINDWARD as figures subsumed by the landscape. Posed with striking directness, each child is seen asserting an agency within their material and environmental conditions, positioning them as active participants in their own futures.
WINDWARD is co-commissioned and co-produced by Shorefast/Fogo Island Arts, The Vega Foundation, and the National Gallery of Canada, with the support of The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery and Walter Phillips Gallery, Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity. Courtesy the artist and neugerriemschneider, Berlin. © Sharon Lockhart, 2025.
The exhibition is made possible through the generous support of the Canada Council for the Arts, Alberta Foundation for the Arts, Government of Canada and Government of Alberta.