The one-time matriarch of the inland Ahiarmiut (Caribou Inuit) camp at Ennadai Lake, 400 kilometres west of Hudson Bay, Elizabeth Nutaraaluk began carving seriously in the mid 1960s after her family’s relocation to Arviat. She is best known for her moving depictions of mothers and children (see Lot 13). Nutaraaluk’s classic stone works from the 1970s display remarkable delicacy despite their overall primal style, but as she became older her sculptures became ever rawer and more expressionistic, and the psychological impact of her works more intense. Nutaraaluk kept carving even as she began to lose first her strength in the late 1980s and then her eyesight in the early 1990s.

In her last years, Nutaraaluk created mostly blocky human heads (sometimes nicknamed her “Easter Island heads”), as well as a small number of stark mask-like heads and faces, in which she utilized antler as a secondary inlay material (see First Arts Auction, July 2020, Lot 41 for an important example). We described a work formerly in the Albrecht Collection as a “mask of almost frightening bleakness” [1].

Nutaraaluk carved relatively few figures (and virtually no mother-and-child compositions) during this same final period in her career, and only a few works that could be considered large. Self-Portrait is, therefore, unusual in being not only a figure but also quite monumental in scale. Thematically and stylistically the sculpture is a hybrid: part figure and part mask; part stone and part antler. The one concession to her earlier style is the trademark pair of hatch-mark braids running down the woman’s back. The caribou antler eyes, teeth, and claw-like hands impart the work a bleakness that has been rarely matched in Inuit art. The raw intensity of the image invites comparison with Outsider Art. Nutaraaluk’s Self-Portrait is a truly awe-inspiring sculpture.

1. See Hessel, Arctic Spirit, 2006, cat. 132.

References: For stylistically similar depictions of a single human face by Nutaraaluk see Ingo Hessel, Arctic Spirit: Inuit Art from the Albrecht Collection at the Heard Museum, (Douglas & McIntyre/Heard Museum, 2006), cat. 132, and Walker’s Auctions, Ottawa, 16 November 2016, Lot 190. For other works utilizing or comprising caribou antler see see First Arts Auction, 12 July 2020, Lot 41; and 14 June 2022, Lot 151.