I designed it like a shadow, like one part of the face being in the dark. As if it wasn’t brightly lit in the home in those days. Also, a face is different on both sides [1].

One of the most impressive and stately prints from Kinngait, Pitaloosie’s Woman and Snow Bird is also one of the most recognizable. The female figure is depicted with poignancy and grace, yet she seems almost monumental in scale given how her image dominates the sheet of paper. Her floating form is a commanding presence, made up of contrasting blazing red and brilliant blue stencilling - which suggests that half her face has fallen into shadow. In her petite hands the woman holds a white bird. The hands and bird have been outlined in black but are shown as pristine white negative space against the blue. The woman’s beautiful, looped hair braids and her amautiq fringe are lovingly chiselled by Lukta Qiatsuk serve as another sensitive contrast to the broadly stencilled forms. Perhaps what captivates us most, however, is the young woman’s gentle but powerfully penetrating gaze, concentrated intently on, us, the viewer.

1. From a 1992 interview with Marion E. Jackson and Odette Leroux, in Leroux et al, eds., Inuit Women Artists (Gatineau: Canadian Museum of Civilization / Vancouver: Douglas & McIntyre, 1994), p. 159.

References: This famous image by Pitaloosie has been exhibited and illustrated numerous times. See Ingo Hessel, Arctic Spirit: Inuit Art from the Albrecht Collection at the Heard Museum, (Vancouver: Douglas & McIntyre / Phoenix: Heard Museum, 2006), cat. 190 (see text and essay by Pitaloosie); Susan Gustavison and Darlene Coward Wight, Pitaloosie Saila: A Personal Journey, (Winnipeg: Winnipeg Art Gallery), 2017, cat. 21; Odette Leroux et al ed., Inuit Women Artists: Voices from Cape Dorset (Douglas & McIntyre/Canadian Museum of Civilization, 1994), p. 158; see short quote by Pitaloosie on p. 159.