We often speak of how many first-generation Inuit artists, navigating the seismic shift from a nomadic life on the land to a settled existence, took on the role of visual historians, translating memory into paper and stone.

Pitseolak Ashoona stands among the most vivid of these chroniclers. Much of her work forms a kind of affectionate archive: scenes of camp life rendered not in mourning, but in celebration. In this particular drawing, a family settles into a summer dwelling, likely part stone, part whale bone, draped in hides and half sunken into the earth. Raised food caches punctuate the landscape. And yet, what lingers is not the structure itself, but the feeling: Ashoona’s figures do not endure the scene, they inhabit it, with calm and joy.

References: Image reproduce in The Inuit Print, exh. cat., the National Museum of Man (Ottawa, ON), 1977, pp. 96, pl. 40