Amongst the most impressive and commanding prints to emerge from Kinngait, Pitaloosie's Woman and Snow Bird is also one of the most recognizable. A study in presence, the female figure is depicted with incredible poignancy and grace. She seems to float across the sheet, monumental in scale, her ample, rounded forms and long, fluid curves filling the composition. There is a wonderful sense of fullness to the body, yet the figure remains suspended, her feet nowhere to be seen, her weight seemingly released from the world beneath her.

Her floating form is built from contrasting fields of stencilled blazing red and royal blue inks. In her comparatively petite hands, the woman holds a white bird, its small body and her fingers outlined in black and left as pristine white negative space against the blue. The fringe of her amautiq, painstakingly chiselled by Lukta Qiatsuk, is rendered strand by strand, the slender incisions seeming to tremble against the broad fields of colour and further suspending the figure between earth and air.

While one might expect the titular snow bird to command the eye, it is the woman's striking visage that draws us with equal force. Her gaze is gentle but remarkably direct, her dark eyes fixed upon us with an intensity that seems almost at odds with the stillness of her floating body. She looks outward from the sheet with such concentrated attention that the distance between her and us, the viewer, seems to collapse.

The division of her face between cool blue and deep red inevitably invites comparison with Picasso's experiments with the fractured visage [1]. Pitaloosie, however, offered a wonderfully direct explanation for her own treatment of the face:

I designed it like a shadow, like one part of the face being in the dark. As it wasn't brightly lit in the home in those days. Also, a face is different on both sides [2].

Her explanation brings us back to the particular tenderness of the image. What might first appear to be a formal division of colour is, in Pitaloosie's telling, something more intimate and familiar, the simple observation that a face changes as light falls across it.

1. In fact, when responding to Marion Jackson in a 1979 interview about whether or not she was influenced by Picasso, Pitaloosie said, "I didn't know [of] that guy before [...] it's my own [...] I just followed my heart." Hear the interview at https://www.historymuseum.ca/capedorsetprints/include/modalArtefact.php?lang=en&code=60. Accessed 5 Oct 2026.

2. From a 1992 interview with Marion E. Jackson and Odette Leroux, in Leroux et al, eds., Inuit Women Artists, (Gatineau: Canadian Museum of Civilization / Vancouver: Douglas & McIntyre, 1994), p. 159.

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