“In a day and age where we are constantly fed information, both through the internet and in our everyday lives, it is important to continue creating, no matter how the world revolves around us…”
Third Shift statement on the 2025 festival theme, ‘Revolve’
A dragon dressed in electric green floats high above the sun-bleached sand, eventually finding a perch in a cedar. Below his gaze, hundreds of people bake in the relentless August sun. Eventually, the heat will scorch provincial forests; for now, it drives people to the reliably cold Atlantic bay.
Although on this day, we are also driven by the promise of art, albeit very temporary. Previously a one-day amateur competition – a 30+ year stalwart of the local summer schedule, formerly known as the New River Beach Sand Sculpture Competition – the Bay of Fundy Sand Sculpture Festival at New River Beach now boasted three days of competition, workshops, and vendors. A focal point of the rebrand is a “Master Series”, with three teams of two professional sculptors creating masterful works of art in six hours – to only then watch it disappear forever in another six. (Unlike other parts of the world, the Bay of Fundy has a demanding rinse-repeat schedule of two high tides – the highest in the world – and two low tides each day.)
It’s always felt a tad bittersweet to watch a slumping sandcastle, adorned with seashells and seaweed, to melt back into the ocean. It’s hard to describe how one is supposed to feel, though, watching the sum of years of technique and talent meet the same fate; no end result to sit in perpetuity and amass social capital. It felt brave.
A few days later, we travel to St. Martins, a small fishing village, for the Fundy Sea Shanty Festival. Sea shanties were born out of necessity – to relieve the boredom of working life on a ship, but primarily to help sailors keep time in hauling ropes, raising masts, and the like.
The sea shanty is a form of music that has a limited catalogue; unless a song were created on a ship and shared with other ships, it cannot be considered a shanty. It is an art at risk of being forever lost. Some shanties were never written down and so died with the last person who knew their words and tune. Those that were written down are only kept alive through performance and thus sharing this gift.
A week later, I volunteered a few hours of a Saturday night to Third Shift, a contemporary art festival that turns the nooks of uptown Saint John into exhibition spaces. A focal point of the festival is the titular “Third Shift“, wherein installations and performances pop up on sidewalks, public parks, alleys and door ways. During this event, passerby are both viewer and creator of art, e.g., punching bags become journals of worries and fears to then be knocked about; a tent surrounded by netting slowly becomes a woven tapestry of the community’s whims; a suited man with a bag over his head, eyeholes cut out, holds debates. The process brings folks together and etches something in the collective memory that transcends the digital ephemera.
While we can look back at snaps and reminisce about how we felt that day on the shore or in the park, the salty air and buoyed spirit are never quite recaptured de nouveau. Actually, aside from the above records, I did my best to put the camera away and simply exist in the creativity being celebrated around me. It felt like a defiant indulgence to do so, connecting with others – friends and strangers alike – in the shared experiences.
Summer never lasts as long as we’d like. Neither does some art, except it was precisely the temporary, brave nature of these works that captured my mind. And August was a month of courageous art, created and performed for the simple act of creating and performing. It’s a protest – a statement, not unlike a rebellious kite that proudly flies in the face of a world that demands art for posterity and not for community.
But together, we persist.
campfire notebook. 
Leave a comment