Kiakshuk, the eldest hunter-turned-artist in Cape Dorset, occupies a unique space in the history of Inuit art. Though regarded as a powerful shaman, his work rarely lingered on the supernatural. Instead, his drawings carried the weight of lived experience, a kind of visual memory rendered in steady, deliberate lines. His younger cousin and fellow artist, Pitseolak Ashoona, recalled his work with reverence: “Because Kiakshuk was a very old man, he did real Eskimo drawings. He did it because he grew up that way, and I really liked the way he put the old Eskimo life on paper.” 

Pitseolak saw in these works a preservation of culture, a subtle yet powerful stand against the erosion of time and change. Kiakshuk’s images draw from his early life on the land, each one reflecting the steady rhythms of camp life: scraping hides, making tools, and performing the daily acts of survival that shaped his world. In this work, a woman bends over a hide, her hands engaged in the familiar cycle of turning raw material into the clothing needed for life in the Arctic. It is an unremarkable task and yet monumental, a single moment in the everyday labour that sustained an entire way of life.