John Pangnark rose to prominence in the Arviat art scene through his minimalist approach to sculpture, which art historian George Swinton famously compared to the work of Constantin Brâncuși. Swinton admired Pangnark’s ability to distill forms to their purest essence, an approach that resonated with the austere aesthetic of Arviat sculpture, marked by its formal sensitivity and geometric abstraction. While Pangnark is often celebrated as Inuit art’s most minimalist and abstract practitioner, his style was far from static. It shifted fluidly between figural and abstract, geometric and free-form.

In the mid to late 1960s, Pangnark’s works often balanced figural representation with geometric rigor, while his works from the early-mid 1970s embraced high abstraction, their forms shaped by the natural contours of the stone. By 1975, however, Pangnark’s style transformed once again. This Mother and Child, a compelling example of his later free-form work, illustrates this shift. Here, Pangnark forgoes working strictly with the natural shape of the stone, treating it more like clay to create smooth, rounded forms. The figures—heads, arms, legs—appear squeezed and stretched into being, biomorphic in their fluidity, as though the solid stone had taken on the lightness of an inflated balloon sculpture.