This work reminds us of one of Audla's most famous works, a stunning Sedna figure in the TD Bank Collection. [1] Both works exhibit lovely female faces with delicate features and serene expressions, and both possess braids that are impossibly fine and seem to push the stone to its tensile limits.

Audla’s Mother Holding a Child, to our eyes, also recalls a very different tradition: the European Medieval and Renaissance Madonna and Child. As with so many sculpted and painted masterpieces illustrating that subject, this placid seated mother supports a lively young child on her lap in a protective embrace, evoking feelings of intimacy and maternal love. It’s an extraordinarily beautiful and moving work of art.

1. See George Swinton, Sculpture of the Inuit (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1972/92), fig. 107.

References: In the 1955 publication, Eskimo Sculpture, (Department of Northern Affairs and National Resources and the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, 1955), no. 65, a Mother & Child by Audla is referenced but not illustrated. For another fine work by the artist see Canadian Eskimo Arts Council, Sculpture / Inuit: Masterworks of the Canadian Arctic (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1971), cat. 310; also illustrated in Darlene Coward Wight, The Jerry Twomey Collection, (Winnipeg: Winnipeg Art Gallery, 2003), p.55, and elsewhere.