Jessie Oonark began selling drawings soon after her arrival in Baker Lake in 1958. By 1963, Gabriel Gély, then a crafts officer in the community, was purchasing her small textiles, and two years later George Swinton acquired a pair during a visit. Most of Oonark’s hangings from this early period were modest in scale, often enlivened with decorative stitching or appliqué along the borders. These early hangings frequently feature numerous activities within the same image. Untitled Work on Cloth (Women’s Faces, Figure and Dog), in many respects, resembles study sketches which artists would use as exercises to refine techniques and to prepare for larger compositions.

The dominant motif in this textile inevitably recalls Oonark’s Tattooed Faces (lot 15). Like this early print, it offers a glimpse of the artistic direction she would follow and already signals the focus on women that would form the core of her art. The composition of this work on cloth is at once clear and enigmatic. Are the three tattooed faces separate women in conversation or are they studies of the same face viewed from the front and sides? Are the man and dog central to the conversation or are they simply filling a compositional void? The uncertainty is part of the work’s power, inviting the viewer to linger over the relationships between figures and the balance of the design.

MBL