The highly detailed Head of a Woman with Tattoos is characteristic of Manassie’s approach to art making, which he explored through his own unique style of abstraction, inspired by organic forms. Manasie himself remarked, “I use the shape of the materials a lot. I don’t try to push my ideas. I have to respect the material, what it wants to be, as well [1].” In effect, the artist has explained his working process for the present work. Here, Manasie has utilized the natural shape of the ancient vertebrae to produce the effect of a wind swept hood. The outer ring of the vertebral bone has been gently scalloped and recast as a fur trim that surrounds the woman’s face. Her visage is rendered with painstaking care; Manasie has deeply recessed her centre parted hair, cheeks, and chin and engraved the woman’s face to delineate her eyebrows, lashes, and importantly, her traditional tattoos (or tunniit).

1. Darlene Wight, Manasie: The Art of Manasie Akpaliapik, 1990, unpaginated.

References: For a contemporaneous example of the artist’s works, see Shaman Muskox, 1995-6, illustrated in Gerald McMaster, ed., Inuit Modern: The Samuel and Esther Sarick Collection, (Toronto: Art Gallery of Ontario, 2010), p. 188. For several other examples of Manasie’s sculpture see Harold Seidelman and James Turner, The Inuit Imagination: Arctic Myth and Sculpture, (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1993).