In her landmark 1985 book on the artist, Jean Blodgett observed that “in Kenojuak’s graphics, subject and form often develop simultaneously” [2]. Kenojuak herself described her approach in similarly intuitive terms: “I may start off at one end of a form not even knowing what the entirety of the form is going to be; just drawing as I am thinking, thinking as I am drawing … I try to make things which satisfy my eye, which satisfy my sense of form and colour” [3]. Her drawings, in other words, were not translations of preexisting ideas but visual improvisations, emerging gradually, shaped by instinct and refined until they achieved balance and harmony.

This process-oriented way of working had been noticed years earlier by James Houston, who identified a direct formal continuity between Kenojuak’s compositions and the appliquéd garments he had encountered in the North:

Kenojuak’s images retain the connecting patterns found in the original skin appliqués. In her work there is often an elaborate web that forms an over-all design. The extended wings and hands and legs grow into each other. One realizes that not only the figures but [also] the spaces between the figures have been consciously or unconsciously calculated. One must try to compose such a design to fully appreciate its complexity [4].

As Houston notes, the source of that continuity lay in Kenojuak’s own experience making such designs. As a young woman in South Baffin, she created skin appliqué herself, working alongside other women in her community to stitch elaborate motifs onto clothing and bags. These motifs often featured symmetrical, interconnected forms and a flowing repetition that balanced precision with creativity. This early training fostered an instinct for composition in which individual elements were never isolated but always part of a larger, interdependent whole.

This sensibility is vividly present in Complex of Birds. The elements within the image seem to unfurl from one another, their forms linked by a rhythmic visual logic. Wings and limbs extend, blend, and mirror each other in a way that suggests not only formal intent but also a kind of structural choreography. The result is an image that feels both composed and unbounded, rooted in tradition yet unmistakably her own. Rather than illustrating a specific subject, the work reads as a sustained exploration of balance, motion, and beauty.

1. In the early years at Kinngait, stonecuts were often printed on whatever paper was available, with ideas of uniformity and standardization only taking hold in the early 1960s. It is, therefore, possible that this particular example was later trimmed.

2. Blodgett, Kenojuak, 1985, p. 21-22.

3. Ibid.

4. Houston, Eskimo Prints, 1971, p. 93.

ND

References: This print is reproduced in James Houston, Eskimo Prints ,(Toronto: Longman, 1971), p. 37; Bernadette Driscoll, Uumajut: Animal Imagery in Inuit Art, (WAG, 1985), cat. 50; Gerald McMaster ed., Inuit Modern (Toronto: AGO, 2010), p. 174; and elsewhere. The print is also reproduced, alongside Kenojuak's original graphite drawing, in Dorothy LaBarge, From Drawing to Print: Perception and Process in Cape Dorset Art, (Calgary: Glenbow Museum, 1986), pp. 24-25.