Thomas Ugjuk, the son of the renowned Rankin Inlet artist John Kavik, lived for decades in the Baker Lake region, travelling and hunting as far afield as Cambridge Bay, before settling in Rankin Inlet in 1958 to work at the nickel mine, which closed however in 1962. Ugjuk never became a full-time artist like his father but carved enough to help feed his family and buy hunting supplies. Kavik lived with Ugjuk until shortly before his death in 1993. Life on the Land is one of Ugjuk’s most impressive works; a smaller but quite similar composition is in the collection of the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts.

Ugjuk’s style shows the influence of both Kavik’s raw carving style and John Tiktak’s later and rugged multiple face works, but on the whole his sculptures are rather more realistic and narrative. Life on the Land situates the multiple face motif in a landscape/camp setting, adding numerous animal heads as well. Carved from an extremely hard stone, the sculpture exudes a primal power that is uniquely Ugjuk’s. We love the way that the igloo, as well as the human and animal faces, grows out of the veritable mountain of a rock. The work is a monument, not a sculpture [1].

1. See Ugjuk’s equally impressive Eighty-Two Faces in Ingo Hessel, Arctic Spirit (Heard Museum, 2006), p. 162.