In the catalogue From the Centre: The Drawings of Luke Anguhadluq, curator Cynthia Waye Cook relates Anguhadluq’s first experiments with drawing and carving in the very early 1960s. Anguhadluq had resisted earlier attempts to get him to carve artworks but carved occasional antler tools as crafts items. A small, extremely slender and fragile caribou carved in red sandstone caught the attention of the crafts development officer Bill Larmour, who described it in a November 1961 report, “I have a carving of a caribou in the classical Keewatin tradition which would send Henry Moore up the wall and it is I’m afraid very breakable, made by the noble patriarch [Anguhadluq]” [1].

Documented carvings by Anguhadluq are exceedingly scarce; a considerably larger Caribou in the Twomey Collection at the Winnipeg Art Gallery, which is similar in style but sturdier and with shorter antlers; and a Head in the Winnipeg Art Gallery’s Zazelenchuk Collection catalogue come to mind (see online references). This exquisite Caribou is about the size of the example described by Larmour, though fully carved in the round. Its sleek, slightly abstracted form is truly elegant and bears a strong resemblance to Anguhadluq’s drawings of the animal (see previous Lot). Our hunch is that Henry Moore would have very much approved. Fabulous.

References: One of the only other Caribou ever carved by Anguhadluq is a somewhat larger but very similarly styled carving dated c. 1963 in the Jerry Twomey Collection at the WAG; see Darlene Coward Wight, The Jerry Twomey Collection, (Winnipeg: Winnipeg Art Gallery, 2003), p. 88, also ill. in Bernadette Driscoll, Uumajut: Animal Imagery in Inuit, (Winnipeg: Winnipeg Art Gallery, 1985), cat. 20.