Lucy Tasseor began carving around 1965 or 1966; her sculptural style was well developed by the end of that decade, and five of her works were chosen for the famous Sculpture/Inuit travelling exhibition of 1971-73. These and similar sculptures were exquisite but still mostly modest in scale, able to be held and caressed in the hand. Tasseor hit her stride very quickly, and by the mid 1970s was regularly creating larger and more imposing sculptures.

Family and Igloos is a brilliant example of her mature “classic” style of the mid-late 1970s. It is not enormous but it is certainly monumental. It evokes not only family and community but also landscape. The image is simultaneously modern and timeless; sleek and primal; celebratory and sober. Tasseor has followed the natural shape of the stone, and the work is certainly grounded, yet it also feels as if she has built an edifice that rises to the sky like a cathedral. The figures too - yes, they look like faces but they are surely figures - seem ready to burst forth and fly to the heavens. The incised igloo shapes are conceptual, almost ephemeral - as igloos always were, and as they became little more than memories. As a woman, Tasseor was pretty down to earth; as a sculptor, she was a poet.

References: For examples of Tasseor sculptures with similarly incised igloos see Norman Zepp, Pure Vision: The Keewatin Spirit, (Regina: Norman Mackenzie Art Gallery, 1986), cat. 35; also illustrated in Ingo Hessel, Inuit Art: An Introduction, (Vancouver: Douglas & McIntyre, 1998), fig. 81, and elsewhere. For another see Ingo Hessel, Arctic Spirit: Inuit Art from the Albrecht Collection at the Heard Museum, (Vancouver / Phoenix: Douglas & McIntyre / Heard Museum, 2006), cat. 133. For several other important examples of Tasseor’s work in the Pure Vision catalogue see the section on pages 86-95. For five fine early works see Canadian Eskimo Arts Council, Sculpture Inuit: Masterworks of the Canadian Arctic, (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1971), figs. 236, 286, 360, 390, 393.