Nutaraaluk’s carvings of mothers and children from the 1970s carry a lyrical resonance shaped by memory and lived experience. Her work is inseparable from the hardships she and her family endured during the 1950s, when famine and forced relocations uprooted entire communities. After resettling in Arviat in the early 1960s, she began to carve, and her ability to channel those histories into form quickly brought her recognition.

She once reflected:

Before I carve I think about women, how they lived a hard life before, they were always cold. [...] When I make my carvings I think of how weak and cold I used to be, how I had to carry firewood on my back, that’s what I remember. [...] My carvings of mothers and children represent me trying to keep the child from crying and trying to do work at the same time. […] When you see a carving, please understand that it represents the lifestyle of the Inuit, how they worked and how they lived [1].

Her sculptures balance rawness with tenderness, carrying within them the weight of love, anguish, hope, and sometimes fatigue. This Mother Holding Child is rather large in scale, its rugged form softened by an undercurrent of care. Two long braids, etched with Nutaraaluk’s characteristic hatch lines, anchor the figure. The carving shows how she was able to shape stone into an image that feels at once unyielding and deeply humane.

1. Artist interview with Ingo Hessel, August 1989, in Arctic Spirit (2006), 41.

MBL