Although Elizabeth Nutaraaluk, passionately devoted to her family, carved mothers and children almost exclusively, Mother and Two Children is unusual in presenting two children, or perhaps grandchildren, rather than the customary one. Comparison with a similarly themed work dated 1974 shows how decisively her carving changed over time (see First Arts, 12 June 2023, Lot 29). The two sculptures share a comparable scale and monumental weight, but in the present work Nutaraaluk follows the stone more freely, allowing its bulk, bends and blunt contours to shape the figures.

Mother and children seem pressed together within a single compact mass. Bodies swell from the stone, shoulders soften into flanks, and faces emerge with only the necessary cuts and curves. This is the rugged, resistant manner for which Nutaraaluk is best remembered. Its rawness invites comparison with John Kavik of Rankin Inlet, though here the subject gives that severity a more intimate charge. Especially characteristic are the scored hatch marks defining braids and hands, small sharp scratches set against the broad, coarse surfaces of the sculpture.

Originally from the inland Ahiarmiut (Caribou Inuit) camp at Kitigaq (Ennadai Lake), Nutaraaluk and her family were forcibly relocated several times during the 1950s before finally settling in Arviat in the early 1960s. Among the first in the community to take up carving, she became one of Arviat’s most important sculptors and continued working until weakness and blindness ended her career in the early 1990s.

FA