Practical to a southern audience, utilitarian items like match holders were a popular item to carve while trading with early explorers to the north, and especially during the burgeoning years of the crafts programs. Many examples of match holders from the late 1940s and early 1950s, carved in a variety of materials such as antler, ivory, and stone like this one, had more abstract designs that seemed less influenced by local cultural motifs, but possibly more from the presence of James Houston, who encouraged carvers to “decorate” their work as illustrated in Houston’s 1951 booklet Eskimo Handicrafts.

This match holder presents an interesting bridge in the span of Inuit art; between small miniatures as toys and effigies, toggles, and combs, to the broad exploration of art making as we know and see it today in the north, this work is a transcultural object handed over between two different groups of people, a useful thing made pretty and decorative.