Printed in 1960, Birds Over Sun ranks as one of the earliest examples that combines what would become two of Kenojuak’s most recognizable motifs — birds and the sun — into a single, elegant image that represents the artist’s poetic visual language at its most simplified. Compared to her other silhouetted images of this period, such Complex of Birds, Dream, and Vision in Autumn, wherein the forms overlap and interconnect to create an abstract design, in Birds Over Sun, Kenojuak opts for a more simplistic scene. At the centre of the sheet, three silhouetted, black inked birds soar majestically in front of a warm sun that, in its mingled yellow and orange inks, seems to pulsate and shimmer with a turbulent energy.

Birds Over Sun is one of the few prints referred to as the “Dorset Series” (also called the Dorset Collection, the Northern Collection, or Northern Releases). These prints were not included in catalogued annual Cape Dorset print collections, and were therefore not sold in southern galleries. Rather, they were sold informally and locally to visitors through the West Baffin Eskimo Co-op and, as such, their appearance on the market is somewhat more rare than the annually issued prints.