Kivalliq Region seamstresses have decorated amautiit, hair-sticks, and occasionally dolls with European glass trade beads since the 19th century. It may have been the Arviat artist Susan Ootnuyuk (1918-1977), Talooki’s aunt,  who was the first to adorn carvings with simple strands of beads (see Sculpture/Inuit, cat. 387 for an example from 1968). Eva Talooki began carving in the late 1960s as well, but didn’t begin adding beads until around 1980, influenced perhaps by her aunt and likely also by artists such as Joy Hallauk, who incorporated beads into her works on cloth. Talooki used beads consistently and to great effect in her stone and antler carvings until her death in 1994. Mostly she fashioned simple strands to decorate her usually quite small, doll-like carvings, but occasionally she worked on a larger scale, or with a greater degree of elaboration.

In the 1995 Marion Scott Gallery catalogue, Inspiration, Norman Zepp notes that with Woman, “… one of her largest pieces ever, the contrast [between stone and beads] produces a remarkable sense of the precious in spite of the broad generalized form of the underlying figure” [p. 52]. We have long admired Talooki’s small, beaded figures for their charm, but this sculpture takes things to a different level. By Talooki’s standards Woman is a monumental statement, perhaps her chef d'oeuvre. In our opinion it ranks as a masterpiece of Arviat sculpture, imposing in its stark simplicity and remarkably elegant.

References: For a smaller but similarly monumental work by Talooki in the Swinton Collection at the WAG, see Susan Gustavison, Northern Rock: Contemporary Inuit Stone Sculpture, (Kleinburg: McMichael Canadian Art Collection, 1999), cat. 32; also illustrated in Darlene Coward Wight, Creation and Transformation: Defining Moments in Inuit Art, (Winnipeg: Winnipeg Art Gallery, 2012), cat. 81. For other fine works by the artist see Ingo Hessel, Arctic Spirit: Inuit Art from the Albrecht Collection at the Heard Museum, (Vancouver: Douglas & McIntyre / Phoenix: Heard Museum, 2006), cats. 151, 152. For another monumental work by the artist see Walker’s Auctions, Ottawa, 16 November 2016, Lot 83. See the article by Dorothy Harley Eber, “Eva Talooki: Her Tribute to Seed Beads, Long-time Jewels of the Arctic” in Inuit Art Quarterly, (Vol. 19, No. 1, Spring 2004), pp. 12-17. For early works by Talooki’s aunt, Susan Ootnooyuk, Canadian Eskimo Arts Council, Sculpture / Inuit: Masterworks of the Canadian Arctic, (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1971), cat. 387; and Jean Blodgett, Grasp Tight the Old Ways: Selections from the Klamer Family Collection of Inuit Art, (Toronto: Art Gallery of Ontario, 1983), cat. 110. Ootnooyuk was not prolific; only a handful of works by her are known.