Although Yvonne Kanayuq is considered to have been one of the most important Baker Lake female sculptors in the late 1960s and 1970s, there is virtually no documented information on her life. We know that she submitted two works to the sculpture competition organized in 1970 by the Canadian Eskimo Arts Council; that her work has been shown in at least twenty-five exhibitions; and that it is held in at least a dozen public collections including the National Gallery of Canada, the Winnipeg Art Gallery, and the Art Gallery of Ontario. Kanayuq carved family groups almost exclusively; the majority of her mostly small-scale carvings depict children of various ages clustered around the seated figure of a mother.

Mother with Three Children is the largest and most imposing example of Kanayuk’s that we have ever seen. Many, if not most, of the artist’s carvings would fit comfortably in one’s hand, and the best of these have a delicacy and intimacy fitting to that scale. We are happy to report that Kanayuq’s artistic sensibility works beautifully when scaled up, at least in the case of this superlative sculpture. Mother with Three Children is an iconic work in the finest Baker Lake tradition. It is easily as impressive as the finest sculptures by Kanayuq’s female peers such as Miriam Qiyuk, Nancy Pukingrnak, Marie Kuunnuaq, and Victoria Mamnguqsualuk, and it certainly rivals contemporaneous works by Peter Sevoga, Mathew Aqigaaq, George Tatanniq and other of her male peers. Mother with Three Children achieves monumentality both literally and metaphorically; it has the air of a religious image, as if the subject matter were Madonna with three Children.

References: The format of this outstanding sculpture is quite similar to several other examples that we know of by the artist: an almost comparably sized work from 1975 is illustrated in Alistair Macduff and George M. Galpin, Lords of the Stone: An Anthology of Eskimo Sculpture (North Vancouver: Whitecap Books, 1982), p. 96; and a smaller work exhibited in Darlene Wight’s exhibition Winnipeg Collects: Inuit Art from Private Collections (Winnipeg: Winnipeg Art Gallery, 1987), cat. 33. See also George Swinton, Sculpture of the Inuit (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1972/92), fig. 61 (Mother and Children from 1970, WAG), and fig. 679; and Darlene Coward Wight, The Faye and Bert Settler Collection (Winnipeg: Winnipeg Art Gallery, 2004), pp. 55-57. See also Maria von Finckenstein, editor, Celebrating Inuit Art 1948-1970 (Gatineau: Canadian Museum of Civilization, 1999) p. 171 for an example once owned by James Houston and subsequently offered at Walker’s Auctions, Ottawa, November 2015, Lot 112