Development of Art in Nunavut

Carvings
Prints
Fibre Arts
Jewelry
Ceramics
Painting

For decades, the worldwide artistic reputation of Canada's Inuit has been based largely on exquisite carvings of stone, antler and bone, and to a lesser extent, prints. While carving and printmaking continue to play a central part in both Nunavut's economy and the artistic expression of its people, Inuit arts and fine crafts today are becoming known as a complex body of work encompassing a wide range of personal and regional styles in media that include the fibre arts, jewelry, ceramics and painting.

It's appropriate that these arts and crafts would engender the same appreciation beyond the North that carving has, as they too have grown directly out of skills developed and observations made over millennia on the land. One of the world's least forgiving climates taught not only carving techniques and the properties of different stone in the fashioning of spear points, qulliq (oil lamps) and small implements, but the metal-working skills that today contribute to jewelry making. From the simple need to clothe families has today grown Inuit fibre arts - tapestries, appliqué, fur fashions, and dolls. From the need to store foods, the nearly lost but now burgeoning craft of Inuit ceramics. And from a desire to beautify many of these everyday objects when Inuit lived on the land, we have today the prints now being produced and appreciated by people everywhere.

Carving skills were developed not merely in the production of everyday objects critical for survival. Intricate carvings sometimes communicated stories and legends that - if not passed down orally - might have been lost. Today, Inuit artisans and craftspeople - freed from the need to produce items that are functional first and foremost - draw on and explore the rich collection of Inuit myths, legends and spiritual beliefs even more heavily, and most recently, have found their arts to be a means of addressing the social changes that Inuit society continues to undergo.

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Because of sculpture's durability, we know more about this medium during the pre-historic period than any other form of Inuit artistic expression. What we know we know mainly through small engravings and carvings both whimsical (doll-like figures) and spiritual (talismans). Many of these date to the Pre-Dorset culture (2500-800 B.C.). In the historic period, through the 19th and early 20th centuries, Inuit traded representations of animals and mythical figures with whalers, explorers and other newcomers to the Arctic.

Everything changed for Inuit art with the visit to the Arctic of Canadian art school graduate James Houston in 1948. Recognizing carving's potential for easing the inevitable entry of Inuit into a modern wage economy, Houston gained the support of the Hudson's Bay Company and the federal government, and with the Canadian Handicrafts Guild (now the Canadian Guild of Crafts), staged the first exhibition of Inuit art in Montreal in 1949. The South's fascination with these Inuit sculptures created an immediate market, a new sector of the northern economy, and opened the way for the marketing of other Inuit arts and crafts.

Soapstone was an early favourite for its softness, but better tools mean harder, longer-lasting serpentine is most common today. Marble, argillite and quartzite of many shades and hardnesses are also used, as are ivory, antler and bone.

There is some degree of carving activity in every Nunavut community. The stone from which a carving is made often indicates the community from which it originated. Subject matter can also suggest the region or even community of origin. Individual artists also have their own styles and favourite themes.

The Inuit people's long experience with engravings - all the way back to Pre-Dorset culture - make printmaking a natural complementary form of expression. It was not until 1962 that James Houston encouraged Cape Dorset artists to produce the first Inuit prints marketed in the South, but since that time artists in Baker Lake (1970), Pangnirtung (1973) and Clyde River (1981) have released regular collections. Many Inuit printmakers work individually or, increasingly, in less organized groups across Nunavut, as well, of course, in well-known Inuit printmaking centres outside the territory such as Holman, Northwest Territories, and Povungnituk, Quebec.

Since James Houston introduced Cape Dorset printmakers to stonecuts and stencilling, Nunavut artists have experimented with a variety of other techniques. Among them, woodcut, silkscreen, lithography, engraving and etching.

Each community has a recognizable style and preference for subject. For the most part, Inuit printmakers in Nunavut have focused on the natural Arctic world, Inuit mythology and scenes of everyday traditional life. Printmakers have not yet turned their attentions to current social issues to the degree carvers have (famed Cape Dorset printmaker Pudlo Pudlat's well-known explorations of airplanes and other symbols of modernity are a notable exception).

Practically, Inuit fibre arts in Nunavut began with the clothing necessary to survival and doll-making to train young girls how to sew. Commercially - with the exception of clothes or dolls exchanged with newcomers - its roots are in 1960s initiatives such as a Pangnirtung weaving project and even before that, garments and tapestries from Baker Lake.

The Baker Lake initiative grew in part out of a near tragedy in the 1950s. When caribou migration patterns changed, the inland Inuit of the Keewatin (Kivalliq) faced the disappearance of their key food source and the source of most of their fabric (coastal Inuit fashions made more use of sealskin). Baker Lake women turned to southern fabrics and advice provided by female teachers and other qallunaat (non-Inuit) living there. The combination of traditional Inuit skills, European techniques, and new textiles in brilliant colours gave rise to beautiful wall-hangings demonstrating the kind of vibrancy and uniqueness that this marriage of traditional and modern today brings to a wide variety of fibre arts in Nunavut.

Among these items, Baker Lake remains best known for its embroidered wall-hangings, the Pangnirtung Uqqurmiut co-op releases several new tapestry designs each year, and Taloyoak is renowned for its "packing dolls," arctic animals carrying their young in wool duffel parkas. Duffel (heavy wool) and inlay and appliqué clothing are produced in many Nunavut communities.

Inuit have created small, purely decorative adornments in ivory and bone for centuries. Women wore hairsticks - pieces of caribou bone around which they wound their hair - as well as copper or leather headbands decorated with animal teeth. Amulets were worn to ward off evil and bring good fortune.

More recently, Nunavut's artists have experimented with mixed media pieces and new materials such as silver. This art form was bolstered by a Department of Indian Affairs and Northern Development crafts competition in 1976 that encouraged artists to fashion new and original "things that make us beautiful." Jewelry workshops resulted in Iqaluit and Cape Dorset, and in the 1990s, a jewelry-making program at Nunavut Arctic College (NAC). Many communities in Nunavut have since received courses/programs in metal jewelry from NAC.

From earrings, broaches and bracelets to the Legislative Assembly of Nunavut's Mace to freestanding silver sculptures, Nunavut's jewelers are making a name for themselves within the Inuit art world.

With the 1962 closure of the North Rankin Nickel Mines that had, in effect, created the community of Rankin Inlet in the 1950s, government was anxious to encourage artists there to explore new, potentially marketable areas. Under the coordination of a federal government arts and crafts officer, these artists tried their hand at carving, sewing and ceramics.

By 1966, the Rankin Inlet Ceramics Project had produced a large collection of innovative pieces that drew on new techniques and traditional themes and designs, but their sale was not yet approved and no market had been developed. In March 1967, a highly promoted Toronto exhibition provided Rankin Inlet ceramics with an instant national profile and critical success. This was clearly a medium for expressing traditional Inuit themes and a truly Inuit perspective on the world. Unfortunately, the pieces may have been priced beyond what most potential collectors were willing to pay for a less well-known Inuit art form, and the connection to traditional methods and materials could not be clearly established in the public mind at a time when Inuit carvings and, interestingly, prints were in great demand due to just such a public perception. The workshop struggled on for a number of years, but closed in 1977.

However, since the early 1990s, a local gallery, the Matchbox Gallery,has been encouraging Rankin Inlet's artists to revisit ceramics as a means of self-expression, with some promising results.

Not a great deal is known of painting in Nunavut's pre-historic period, though a number of Europeans and southerners of the 19th and early 20th centuries collected drawings made by Inuit. Painting was a natural development of traditional visualization and hand-eye skills as well as the introduction of printmaking in the early 1960s. Even today, most Inuit prints begin with a paper drawing that is then transferred to the printmaking medium (e.g. stone), so the choice to not make this transferal and to instead approach the paper image as the final product from the beginning seems a natural one. While painting is, with ceramics, arguably the least developed of Nunavut's fine arts and crafts, it also holds great promise.

As for the future of Inuit art, the public can probably expect continued exploration of work that addresses the rapid societal changes, challenges and opportunities that Inuit continue to experience, and perhaps new media that draw on both traditional Inuit skills and new technologies. At the same time, however, more traditional themes might play a part in reflecting - or perhaps even supporting - the move among many Inuit to keep young people connected to traditional themes and to the land.