Catherine Beaudette
in Maria

A shed is a worksite where one goes to labor. It is also a conceptual space where ideas and imagination interact in a creative flow of problem solving.

Jack’s Shed is made up of 150 photographs taken on different occasions in the shed that still stands on the east coast of Newfoundland. Installed closely together, the photographs reconstruct one corner of Jack Weeks’s shed, built in the late 1800s in the small outport community of Duntara, Bonavista Bay. The shed was a shop for woodworking, boatbuilding, and the repair and storage of fishing gear. It was also where classes were once held before the local school was built, where town meetings took place, and where the occasional Sunday mass was said. Hand built and maintained, the dozens of sheds that dotted the shoreline were once active spaces used every day. The closure of the cod fishery in 1992 resulted in their disuse, as fishermen and their families migrated farther afield seeking other opportunities. All but two of the sheds that remained in Duntara were destroyed in Hurricane Igor (2010), emptying the harbor and silencing the shore. Jack’s Shed commemorates the loss of sheds everywhere, and the way of life that went with them. Jack Weeks died in 2011 at the age of 88, but his shed remains as an important site for dreams and creativity.

Much of Catherine Beaudette’s work is connected to the sea and the communities that border it. Jack’s Shed presents an amalgam of photographs taken by Beaudette over several summers in the community where she resided. There she began to enter abandoned houses and fishery buildings, photographing the deserted spaces and collecting forgotten items. Working in different locations, excavating the detritus of everyday life, Beaudette borrows from the methodologies of archaeology, anthropology and natural history to create her quasi-museological installations of artifacts, specimens, and sites of interest.