Raised on the land in a traditional Netsilik lifestyle, Nick Sikkuark was orphaned as a young boy and cared for briefly by an older brother before being taken into the care of Oblate missionaries. Groomed for the Catholic priesthood, Sikkuark finally left a seminary in Ottawa and returned north in 1965, pursuing work as a carpenter. Sikkuark’s work in both sculpture and drawing blends surrealistic, often bizarre subject matter with realistic detail.

Already a leading light in the “Kitikmeot School” of sculpture for ten years, Sikkuark accepted an invitation to attend the first “Inuit Artists’ College” carving workshop sponsored by the Inuit Art Foundation at the Ottawa School of Art in 1991. Rather than mixing organic materials as he would have back home in Kugaaruk, Sikkuark experimented with the southern stones on hand. Angatkuk is the more important of two sculptures made in Ottawa. Despite being carved in stone rather than fashioned from bone, antler, and ivory, this extraordinary figure of a female walrus-shaman is a brilliant example of Sikkuark’s style. The powerful and slightly menacing shaman is almost mesmerizing in its intensity. And we would suggest that it prefigures, both stylistically and thematically, an impressive body of mostly figural works made by the artist in the late 1990s that would be showcased in the 2003 Marion Scott Gallery exhibition The Art of Nick Sikkuark.

References: For more information on the artist and his work see Marion Scott Gallery, The Art of Nick Sikkuark: Sculpture and Drawings, (Vancouver: Marion Scott Gallery, 2003). See the section on the artist in Darlene Coward Wight, Art & Expression of the Netsilik, (Winnipeg: Winnipeg Art Gallery, 2000), pp. 32-43. For important sculptures by Sikkuark in the Sarick Collection at the AGO, see Ingo Hessel, Inuit Art: An Introduction, (Douglas & McIntyre, 1998), figs. 95-96; and Gerald McMaster ed., Inuit Modern: The Samuel and Esther Sarick Collection, (Toronto: Art Gallery of Ontario, 2010), pp. 148-149. For a discussion of Sikkuark's sculptural style see Robert Kardosh's two-part article, "Natural Fantasia: The Wonderful World of Nick Sikkuark”: Part I in Inuit Art Quarterly (Spring 2005), pp. 8-14, and Part II in Inuit Art Quarterly (Summer 2005), pp. 10-16.