In Tattooed Woman, the figure is shown with an air of gravity and personal dignity, qualities that are underscored in the choice to modulate the work not with colour but instead with variations in the weight of the stonecut lines. This conscious aesthetic refinement draws the viewer’s eye toward the face of the woman, whose seemingly sightless gaze is accompanied by densely packed rows of tattoos on her forehead, cheeks, and especially her chin. While colonial suppression saw the practice of tattooing dwindle in the Arctic, depictions of the practice persisted in Inuit generated, self-pictorial records that were reproduced in anthropological reports. By the 1950s and the arrival of arts and crafts programs, depictions of tattooed faces occupied a prominent position in Inuit graphic and sculptural art from communities throughout the Canadian Arctic, including in Kinngait (Cape Dorset). Pitseolak Ashoona created this alluring portrait, which reads as both a statement of sovereignty and celebration of femininity, in 1960. It was made into a stonecut print and released three years later.

References: This print has been widely reproduced including in Dorothy Eber and Pitseolak Ashoona, Pitseolak: Pictures out of my life, (Montreal / Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1971, second edition, nd, 2003?), p. 21. On page 20, the artist provides her own comments on the imagery. See also Odette Leroux, Marion E. Jackson and Minnie Aodla Freeman, ed., Inuit Women Artists: Voices from Cape Dorset, (Vancouver: Douglas & McIntyre / Gatineau: Canadian Museum of Civilization, 1994), p. 51; The print and its preparatory drawing are reproduced in Gerald McMaster, ed., Inuit Modern: The Samuel and Esther Sarick Collection, (Toronto: Art Gallery of Ontario, 2010), and in Christine Lalonde, Pitseolak Ashoona: Her Life & Work, (Toronto: Art Canada Institute, 2015, digital publication), p. 17 & 18 respectively. For Inuit artist created images of tattooed women in early anthropological reports, see Diamond Jenness, Material Culture of the Copper Eskimo, (Ottawa: Edmond Cloutier, 1946), p. 147; Knud Rasmussen, The Netsilik Eskimos, (Copenhagen: Gyldendalske Boghandel, 1931), p. 312r, 313v; Knud Rasmussen, Intellectual Culture of the Copper Eskimos, (Copenhagen: Gyldendalske, 1932), p. 269v