Malaya Akulukjuk is the grande dame of Pangnirtung graphic and textile art. An impressive woman, she loved to hunt and was reputed to be a shaman (most textiles made from her early drawings depict spirits). She is now most famous for her 1990s landscape imagery. This tapestry depicts a fjord and distant mountains at Spring break up time. Deborah Hickman, longtime arts adviser to the Pangnirtung Tapestry Studio, sums up Malaya’s beautiful landscape imagery:

…Malaya Akulukjuk carefully laid out scenes of mountains and valleys lit by setting suns, of fjords and icefield [sic] coloured in the soft hues of the arctic land. Populated only by inukshuks and birds, the land of her memory is not empty and desolate, as one would imagine, but gives the impression of a paradise, vast, yet inviting. Lack of perspective flattens each image, bringing it to the surface rather than drawing the viewer in. The result is the immediacy of vivid memory [1].

1. See “Malaya Akulukjuk - A Tribute,” IAQ (Summer 1996, Vol. 11, No. 2), p. 56; reproduced in Maria von Finkenstein, ed., Nuvisavik: The Place Where We Weave, (Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2002), p. 74.