COMPOSITION (LEAF BOAT), Shuvinai Ashoona, 2009, Kinngait (Cape Dorset), coloured pencil & ink, 48 x 94 in.
Cape Dorset, known as Kinngait in Inuktitut, is located near the southern tip of Baffin Island. A recent study made the remarkable discovery that Kinngait is Canada’s most artistic municipality, with nearly one-quarter of its labour force engaged in art making. Most Canadians will never visit this remote community, but the work of its artists is held by the Museum of Modern Art and Tate Britain and by all major Canadian cultural institutions.
Born in 1961 to a family at the foremost of artistic production in Cape Dorset since the 1950’s, Shuvinai Ashoona is a young artist of increasing acclaim. She began to draw in the early 1990’s and her work was first featured in Kinngait’s annual print collection in 1997.
Ashoona’s reputation, like that of her cousin Annie Pootoogook, is founded on her extraordinary drawings and not on the few prints made from them to date. This relatively recent shift in the status of drawing by Innuit artists – from sources for prints to autonomous works of art – has occurred during a period of increased attention to drawing in the art world at large.
Painting has died a thousand deaths but no one ever talks about the end of drawing. Drawing continually offers fresh insights into the creative process. They bear intimate, immediate witness to the gestures of the hand and the workings of the mind at particular and irretrievable moments.
When an artist like Shuvinai Ashoona “takes a line for a walk”, to borrow a phrase from the critic Normal Bryson, we pay attention. An uncommon range of styles, subjects, and pints of view characterizes her oeuvre. It includes representations of the landscape, whether subtle and realist or dark and imaginary; careful depictions of favourite motifs such as eggs, tents, boats, and tools; candid views of everyday life in Kinngait; and fantastical scenes that variously conjoin the whimsical, grotesque, biblical, and autobiographical.
Ashoona is devoted to the practice of drawing and is quite prolific. Marcia Connolly, who has made a poignant new film on the artist, Ghost Noise, told me that Ashoona works long hours, and with intense concentration. Her recent drawings are increasingly complex, often enigmatic, compositions that make little distinction between her past and present, real and fictive, and most importantly, exterior and interior worlds. Her images are often possessed of a powerful and brooding intensity: we are drawn to them, even as they resist interpretation. Shuvinai Ashoona’s drawings are the product of her singular artistic vision, one that is borne of, but transcends, a specific place – Kinngait.
Sandra Dyck
October 2009
To view available artwork by Shuinai Ashoona, click here.