Recently widowed and living in Qamani'tuaq (Baker Lake), Jessie Oonark supported herself through work with the Hudson's Bay Company and later as a church custodian. When she told local teacher Bernard Mullen that she could make better pictures than his pupils if only she had the proper materials, she could scarcely have known how prescient the remark would prove. Edith Dodds soon recognized the strength of Oonark's drawings and sent a selection south to Kinngait, where three were adapted as stonecuts for the 1960 and 1961 Cape Dorset print collections. Tattooed Faces was among them.

The print already anticipates many of the subjects and sensibilities that would come to define Oonark's work (see Lots 12 and 13). Seven women fill the sheet, each bearing tunniit, traditional facial tattoos extending across the forehead, cheeks and chin. No two faces are alike. Some are marked by bold bars, others by fine bands, branching lines or delicate linear patterns, each arrangement giving its wearer a distinct character while the repeated format binds the group together. Oonark turns ornament into identity, allowing small variations in line and pattern to distinguish one woman from the next. At this early moment in her career, we can already see her sustained fascination with women, their adornment, and the many ways individuality can be expressed upon the body.

The tradition that Oonark depicts here was already becoming increasingly uncommon by the time this print was made. Inuit women had practiced tattooing for generations but missionary pressure and colonial intervention contributed to its decline throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Markings that had once been a familiar part of women's appearance across the Arctic gradually disappeared from daily life, even as the knowledge and memory of them endured.

For Oonark, that memory remained especially potent. She returned to tattooed women repeatedly throughout her career, drawing upon the women and practices she had known in her youth. Of the women she remembered, she recalled: "I remember when some of the women would have tattoos [...] They looked very pretty" [1]. In Tattooed Faces, that memory becomes motif. The print transforms a practice remembered from Oonark's youth into an elegant study of pattern, adornment and individuality, its seven faces preserving something of a world that was already beginning to recede.

1. Sandra Dyck, ed., Sanattiaqsimajut, 2009, p. 111.

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References: This image has been extensively reproduced, including in Bernadette Driscoll, “Tattoos, Hairsticks and Ulus: The Graphic Art of Jessie Oonark,” Arts Manitoba (Fall 1984), p. 14; Helga Goetz, The Inuit Print, international travelling exhibition (Ottawa: National Museums of Canada and the Department of Indian and Northern Affairs, 1977), pl. 16, p. 67; Jean Blodgett and Marie Bouchard, Jessie Oonark: A Retrospective (Winnipeg: Winnipeg Art Gallery, 1986), cat. 5, p. 96; and Sandra Dyck, ed., Sanattiaqsimajut: Inuit Art from the Carleton University Art Gallery Collection (Ottawa: Carleton University Art Gallery, 2009), p. 111.