Port of Churchill Signage Project

Artist Statement

Perspective-Based Orientation Installation

Christopher W. Quigley

Every place carries more than one story.

The Port of Churchill is known around the world as Canada's Arctic gateway. It is a place of industry, logistics, and national importance. It is also a place that was known, named, travelled, and understood long before the port existed, and it will continue to be understood long after us. I wasn't interested in choosing one of those stories over another. I wanted to create a work that could hold them together.

The installation asks a simple question: What changes when we change where we stand?

From one direction, the work reads PORT OF CHURCHILL. Move through the landscape and that certainty dissolves. From another position, Indigenous place names emerge through the same structure, developed through collaboration with Indigenous partners. Neither reading replaces the other. Both are true. They simply require a different point of view.

That idea became the foundation of the project.

The work is informed by the principle of Two-Eyed Seeing (Etuaptmumk), articulated by Mi'kmaq Elder Albert Marshall: the understanding that different ways of knowing can exist together without one diminishing the other. This installation doesn't explain that principle. It asks people to experience it. Understanding isn't delivered. It is discovered through movement.

The sculpture itself is deliberately restrained. Forty-one weathering steel fins rise from the landscape, acknowledging the forty-one Indigenous and Bayside communities connected to this region. The language is not applied to the surface but cut through it, allowing the sky, the land, and the light to complete the work. Depending on the season and the angle of the sun, shadows extend across the ground, briefly carrying fragments of language beyond the steel itself. For a moment, the land becomes part of the installation.

That was never intended as spectacle. It felt more like a reminder that the landscape has always carried these names, whether we see them or not.

Although I conceived this project, I do not see it as my work alone. I see my role as the conceptual designer—someone assembling the conditions for a larger collaboration. The engineering, Indigenous authorship, fabrication, landscape integration, and technical expertise all belong to the people who will help shape it. Like an orchestra, the work depends on many voices contributing their own discipline and perspective toward something none of us could create alone.

I was born and raised in Manitoba. Today I live in Nova Scotia, where my practice has become increasingly focused on public works that ask people not simply to look at art, but to reconsider the systems, relationships, and assumptions that shape how we see one another.

It is about creating an orientation.

Not simply to the Port of Churchill, but to the idea that understanding begins the moment we are willing to move.