Kenojuak may have begun making sealskin cutout designs before she was diagnosed with tuberculosis in late 1951 and sent to recover at the Parc Savard Hospital in Quebec City from 1952-55. While there she made dolls and various other crafts. Upon her return to Cape Dorset she made sealskin and beaded crafts for Alma Houston’s crafts program. In his first memoir, James Houston recalls seeing Kenojuak on the beach, carrying the bag with the design that would eventually be translated into this famous print. When he asked her what it was she replied, “Rabbit thinking of eating seaweed” [1]. Kenojuak would be the first woman asked by Houston to make drawings, in 1957 or 1958, but Kenojuak’s famous first print Rabbit Eating Seaweed of 1959 was based on the very sealskin bag admired by James Houston years earlier.

Apparently there was no intermediate drawing by Kenojuak; the image on the bag was enlarged on paper and then cut as a stencil for printmaking by Iyola Kingwatsiak. The print edition was pulled in 1958 and included in the first “official” Cape Dorset print collection of 1959, released in the spring of 1960 with great fanfare at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts. On the strength of her one remarkable image, Rabbit Eating Seaweed, Kenojuak began a hugely successful art career that lasted until her death in 2013. Kenojuak became the most famous and celebrated Canadian artist of the 20th century.

Rabbit Eating Seaweed has the lyricism and a sense of magic and mystery that was carried on in many of her famous prints of 1960-61. The imagery and style of prints such as Birds from the Sea, Dog Sees the Spirits, and even The Enchanted Owl all build on the poetry and grace of this marvelous work. The title sounds straightforward enough, but it certainly doesn’t tell us everything; the image remains enigmatic. We know that Kenojuak professed to have little knowledge of or interest in the supernatural, but a gorgeous, dreamy image like this one seems to belie her assertions to the contrary. Extraordinary.