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Queen’s University and the Faculty of Arts and Science is proud to announce a partnership with world-renowned Canadian photographer, and Queen’s Honorary Doctorate recipient (2007), to help realize his new public art piece titled Standing Whale.

The partnership will engage the expertise and innovative thinking of students in multiple programs across the Faculties of Engineering and Applied Science, and the Faculty of Arts and Science. As part of the 2021-22 curriculum, special projects in these programs will be designed to tackle structural and conceptual challenges with the aim of bringing this artwork to life in a public setting.

“Through the duration of this partnership with Queen’s University and the deployment of these multidisciplinary special projects, students will have an opportunity to engage with this artwork in a tangible way and work towards achieving feats of both engineering and storytelling alongside Canada’s most prolific contemporary photographer,” says Dean Barbara Crow, Faculty of Arts and Science.

On the heels of the critically acclaimed and highly successful Anthropocene project, Edward Burtynsky is continuing to push his artistic practice into the third dimension with the creation of his first large-scale public sculptural work, Standing Whale. A true-to-size, 75-foot artistic re-imagining inspired by the retrieved skeletons that washed ashore in 2014, Standing Whale becomes an acknowledgement to the power of telling our human stories, only this time as a three-dimensional sculpture rather than a two-dimensional image.

“My hope is this public art sculpture will become a true Canadian statement: one that symbolizes our commitment to protecting the environment, our cultural institutions and heritage, as well as our efforts to ensure that our planet experiences a positive Anthropocene instead of a negative one," Edward Burtynsky

Based on the story of a pod of North Atlantic Blue Whales that perished in an unprecedented ice event off the coast of Newfoundland in 2014, Standing Whale is a thematic continuation of Burtynsky’s 40-year artistic practice looking at the impacts of humans on the planet. When the bodies of these whales washed ashore following their demise, there were only an estimated 250 left of the population. This pod represented 4% of that at the time. The North Atlantic Blue Whale, like so many other species worldwide, is at risk of becoming a casualty of the climate crisis and Standing Whale acts as an homage to and lament for this loss.