"Standing Whale" Collaborative Project

The Faculty of Arts and Science, and Smith Engineering at Queen’s University, are both partnering with world-renowned Canadian photographer and Queen's Honorary Degree recipient, Edward Burtynsky, to help realize his new public art piece titled, Standing Whale.

The piece will be Edward's first large-scale public sculptural work, and will be a life-size, artistic re-imagining of a whale skeleton.

The Department of Geological Sciences and Geological Engineering will be heavily involved with this exciting project. A design team for course GEOE 446/447 is currently working on the foundation for the structure. The team consists of undergraduate students Deeana Reynolds, Naomi So, and Tommy Tweedie, with technical advisors Dr. Hom Nath Gharti, Dr. Mark Diederichs, and David Didur of Think2Thing Inc., a colleague of Edward Burtynsky's.

Dr. Hom Nath Gharti, Assistant Professor of Digital Earth Sciences, and his team successfully created the fully hexahedral mesh of the whale skeleton, which can be seen in a recent video about the project. Dr. Gharti says, "One of the most challenging tasks of this project is the geometrical discretization of such a unique and complex structure. Now that we successfully tackled the meshing challenge, we can perform the sophisticated structural analysis with unprecedented accuracy and efficiency using high-performance computing." He adds, "This will need a tool that can harness the power of modern computing technology, and we have a versatile tool at our disposal."

The video and more information about Standing Whale can be found in the Queen's Gazette article titled, "Edward Burtynsky to collaborate with Queen's on unique work of public art".

View a video of the mesh, below: