Oviloo Tunnillie is rightly heralded as one of the leading sculptors of her generation. With a style truly defined as her own, Oviloo’s figures are instantly recognizable, and give voice to a woman’s point of view and experience. Powerful depictions of women, be they strong, tender, or sometimes tragic, dominated her career and created a canon of work that is like no other.

Like many of Oviloo’s other female figures, Woman Covering her Face is depicted in a long flowing gown, devoid of any immediate markers of Inuit culture. Her hair drapes down her back, almost to the floor; like a veil, its carved directional texture subtly differs from the graceful flow of the dress. The dress itself could flutter with movement at any moment if the figure were to step back, despite being made of stone. While the woman stands solid and upright, her arms and upper body tilt subtly but dynamically enough to prepare us for drama. With mouth agape in a silent cry of surprise or fear, the woman’s rush of emotion is raw and palpable. Even if we the viewers can only guess at the source of her anguish, we instinctively feel her pain. As Darlene Coward Wight summarized in her catalogue essay for the WAG solo exhibition for Oviloo Tunnillie, “Oviloo’s generalized female subjects exude the emotions of the human condition that transcend gender and culture. Few carvers have been able to accomplish the abstraction of pure emotion through cold, hard stone.” [1] We couldn’t agree more.

1. Darlene Coward Wight, Oviloo Tunnillie: A Woman’s Story in Stone, (Winnipeg Art Gallery, 2016), p. 50.

References: For a comprehensive study of the artist, see Darlene Coward Wight, Oviloo Tunnillie: A Woman’s Story in Stone, (Winnipeg: Winnipeg Art Gallery, 2016); see also Darlene Wight, Oviloo Tunnillie: Her Life & Work, (Toronto: Art Canada Institute, 2016); see also Odette Leroux, ed., Inuit Women Artists: Voices from Cape Dorset, (Hull, QC: Canadian Museum of Civilization, 1994), p. 221-239. For further insight into Oviloo’s work on the female form, see both the IAQ articles Robert Kardosh, “Transcending the Particular: Feminist Vision in the Sculpture of Oviloo Tunnillie, Inuit Art Quarterly, Vol. 24, No. 3, Fall 2009, pp. 24-33, and Peter Millard, “Meditations of Womanhood: Oviloo Tunnillie,” Inuit Art Quarterly, Vol. 9, No. 4, Winter 1994, pp. 20-25. For a similarly conceived contemporaneous figure of a woman by Oviloo in the Sarick Collection at the AGO see Gerald McMaster, ed., Inuit Modern: The Samuel and Esther Sarick Collection, (Toronto: Art Gallery of Ontario, 2010), p. 208. For other similarly posed subjects by the artist see First Arts, 1 Dec. 2020, Lot 107, and 14 June 2022.