Tattooed Faces: Intriguing Questions of Origin and Process

In spite of their compositional differences, a close visual comparison of the earlier rubbing and later inked version shows that both were created with the same matrix. The inked version is reversed, whereas a rubbing produces a direct transfer. More significant are the intentional compositional differences. The rubbing is organized along a horizontal axis, while the published version is more vertical. Although the rubbing contains seven heads, only five are distinct; two are repeated impressions of faces found elsewhere on the sheet. Two faces appearing in the published stonecut are entirely absent from the rubbing. Perhaps Houston used the rubbing to test the matrix and composition. Another possibility is that the matrix was still incomplete when the rubbing was taken, and that the two absent faces had not yet been cut. 

Both versions raise an intriguing, if unanswerable, question: was a rubbing edition of Oonark’s image ever seriously contemplated, or was Houston simply using her newly cut matrix to continue experimenting with a technique that the studio would soon abandon? Houston had learned the Japanese taku-hanga method of stone rubbing from the printmaker Un’ichi Hiratsuka during his study trip to Japan between December 1958 and February 1959. Upon his return to Kinngait in 1959, several printmakers attempted this rubbing process. In Kinngait’s inaugural 1959 collection, however, just two images were issued in small stone-rubbing editions alongside relief versions: Kellypalik Mangitak’s Man Carried to the Moon (see lot 73) and Lukta Qiatsuk’s Owl. The technique was not subsequently adopted as a regular edition medium and seems to have been abandoned by the end of the calendar year. The unique 1959 rubbing of Oonark’s image therefore belongs to this exceptionally brief moment of technical experimentation. 

Accounts differ as to who exactly “discovered” Oonark’s talents and how her drawings reached Kinngait. Oonark herself seems to have initiated this recognition, reportedly telling the schoolteacher Bernard Mullen that she could make good drawings if given proper materials. Early accounts gave Mullen only a limited role and instead emphasized Andrew MacPherson, an Arctic wildlife biologist working in Baker Lake who supplied Oonark with large sheets of paper and coloured pencils in 1959. [2] More recent research shows that Mullen had already given Oonark drawing materials. [3] 

A crucial step came through Edith Dodds, the spouse of the resident Northern Service Officer, who shipped Oonark’s drawings to James Houston in Kinngait. The question of why she sent Oonark’s drawings to Kinngait was addressed by Edith Iglauer in a 1964 MacLean’s article, where Dodds was reported to have met Houston at an Arctic airfield in 1960 while “promoting the growth of the subsequently famous Dorset graphics industry.” There, he asked if she had seen anything at Baker Lake which might be included in Cape Dorset’s second annual collection.[4] While Iglauer’s date corresponds with Bouchard’s previous account, there is an obvious timeline problem: either the rubbing’s date requires reconsideration, the recollected date of the encounter is wrong, or there was an earlier contact between Dodds and Houston. 

Adding another wrinkle to the chronology is Oonark’s own account. In a 1983 interview with Marion Jackson, when asked how she first began drawing, she recalled “two ladies who apparently were on their way to Cape Dorset, and they gave me two pieces of paper. And they asked me to draw tiny drawings. And I drew some. And off they went. They took off.” [5] Oonark could not remember the women’s names but recalled that the encounter took place in 1957. That date predates her documented move to Qamani’tuaq in March 1958 and is difficult to reconcile with another statement in the same interview, in which she said that she began drawing “about a year or two after” moving there. Her recollection of 1957 may therefore simply have been off by a year or more. There is, however, one intriguing complication: Oonark had spent several months in Baker Lake in 1955 while travelling to and from the Fort Churchill General Hospital. There is no evidence connecting that stay with the two unidentified women she remembered, but it means an earlier encounter with drawing materials should not be entirely excluded.

The discrepancy aside, Dodds sent a 24 × 18-inch sheet, folded into four quadrants, two of which contained the core imagery that would eventually be translated into Tattooed Faces and Inland Eskimo Woman. [6] Curiously, the quadrant associated with Tattooed Faces contains only six frontal faces, together with elements omitted from the published print: a head in profile and two elongated figures. The 1959 rubbing complicates the sequence further. Although it contains seven faces, only five appear to be unique, with two repeated; the published stonecut, by contrast, contains seven distinct frontal faces. The progression from six faces in Oonark’s drawing, to five distinct carved forms used to make the rubbing, to seven distinct faces in the published print strongly suggests that the final composition was worked out in Kinngait rather than simply transferred intact from Oonark’s sheet. At least one of the published faces has no obvious counterpart in this surviving source drawing, although whether it was devised in the workshop, adapted from another Oonark image, or derived more freely from an existing face cannot be determined. The original drawing, now in the Winnipeg Art Gallery, shows that Kinngait printmakers did not mechanically reproduce complete compositions, but rather, selected, isolated, rearranged, omitted, and enlarged individual motifs to create autonomous prints. Tattooed Faces therefore belongs as much to the history of collaborative printmaking at Kinngait as it does to the emergence of Oonark’s own visual language.

Houston’s earlier encounter at Ennadai Lake provides an intriguing context for his reception of Oonark’s drawings. In 1955 he had already encountered graphic experimentation among inland Inuit in the Kivalliq region, before printmaking started in Kinngait. His 1956 Canadian Art article, “My Friend, Angotiawak,” includes a reproduction of a drawing made by a 22-year-old man from Ennadai Lake, a region he visited the previous year. The drawing bears suggestive formal affinities with Oonark’s early works, featuring a repetition of discrete motifs across an empty field, rhythmic variation, a strong contour and graphic simplification. [7] In that article, Houston ruminated on the possibilities created by increased access to unfamiliar graphic materials: “with the advent of government schools and new installations of many types across the Arctic, Canadian Eskimos now have opportunities to develop their graphic arts. Paper, brushes, ink and colours are all new to them as art media. If these are properly presented to them, there should be some exciting results.” 

Tattooed Faces occupies an exceptional position in the history of Inuit graphic art. It belongs to the beginnings of Jessie Oonark’s career, the experimental years of the Kinngait print studio, and the prehistory of the graphic movement in Qamani’tuaq. More unusually, the surviving drawing, 1959 rubbing, and published stonecut allow us to glimpse the image at several stages of development. Together, they trace the selection, recomposition, and possibly development of the matrix itself during an exciting moment when neither Oonark’s career nor the future of Inuit printmaking had yet been determined.

 1. See the catalogue entry for Women’s Tatooed Faces, in First Arts, December 5, 2022, Lot 31.