This small sculpture belongs to a broader history of Inuit artists finding humour and humanity in the most elemental of human desires. As Norman Vorano discusses in his 2008 essay on erotic Inuit art, sexuality and humour have long found expression together in Inuit sculpture, even as southern expectations and missionary influence sought to discourage such subjects [1].

Here, the act is decidedly undisguised. Kavik presents two bodies quite literally absorbed in one another, with the top figure positioned above the reclining partner in an embrace that reads at once as both intimate and faintly absurd. All the unabashed intimacy and amusement of the scene find expression in Kavik's rough-hewn style, the scratched and scarred surfaces of the stone lending a particularly playful physicality to this most human of subjects.

1. Norman Vorano, “Erotic Art: Inuit Men, Certain Indecencies… That Need Not Here Be Mentioned,” Inuit Art Quarterly, Vol. 23, No. 3, (Fall 2008), pp. 18-26.

ND