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Artworks
IRENE AVAALAAQIAQ TIKTAALAAQ (1941-) QAMANI'TUAQ (BAKER LAKE)
Transforming Shaman, c. 1970sstone, 7.75 x 12.25 x 3.5 in (19.7 x 31.1 x 8.9 cm)
signed, "ᐊᕙᓚᑭᐊ".16Further images
Irene Avaalaaqiaq and her family moved to Qamani'tuaq around 1959, and it was around 1969-70 that she first tried hand at all three art media: carving, drawing, and sewing works...Irene Avaalaaqiaq and her family moved to Qamani'tuaq around 1959, and it was around 1969-70 that she first tried hand at all three art media: carving, drawing, and sewing works on cloth. She became best-known for her two-dimensional art; she drew regularly throughout the 1970s, with about forty images translated into prints, but has become most famous for her bold and dynamic works on cloth, which typically feature multitudes of transforming beings. Her mother had died soon after Avaalaaqiaq was born and she was for a number of years raised by her grandmother. Her art was inspired by her grandmother:
My grandmother used to tell me stories […] My grandmother told me that animals used to turn into people. My grandmother told me stories to put me to sleep at night. I wondered how I could do something to put the stories my grandmother used to tell me into art.
(From an artist interview with Ingo Hessel, 2004, in Hessel, Arctic Spirit, 2006, p. 123)
Avaalaaqiaq carved only seldom, but each of the pieces we have seen by her look as if they had stepped right out of one of her fantastical drawings or works on cloth. We wish the artist had carved more; Transforming Shaman is a wonderful sculpture, surprisingly large and simply formed but quite magical and impressive in its visual impact. This is very much in the Qamani'tuaq sculptural aesthetic and distinctively her own style. The image is suitably ambiguous. The human head sprouts from the shoulders of a large mammal-–a bear? a muskox?—with its own decidedly bird-like head. We have not found this precise configuration in one of the artist’s 2-D works, but it could only be by Irene! Marvelous.Provenance
Collection of John & Joyce Price, Seattle, WA.
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