Widowed and newly settled in Baker Lake, Jessie Oonark worked first for the Hudson’s Bay Company and later as a church custodian. There she told teacher Bernard Mullen that, given proper materials, she could produce art beyond his students’ efforts. Her confidence was soon affirmed when Edith Dodds recognized her talent and forwarded several drawings to Kinngait, where three were translated into stonecut prints in the 1960 and 1961 Cape Dorset catalogues, including the present Tattooed Faces. This print offered an early glimpse of the extraordinary artistic career that lay ahead for Oonark and already pointed toward the subjects that would define her practice.

Here, seven women appear, each adorned with tunniit (facial tattoos) traced across their cheeks, foreheads, and chins. No two designs are the same; Oonark lingers over each woman’s differences, lavishing care on their individuality. In such a careful act of differentiation, we see the beginnings of the sustained focus on feminine presence that would define so much of her later work.

Tattooing was a widespread practice among Inuit women for thousands of years before the first Europeans set foot in the Arctic. By the nineteenth century, however, the influence of colonial authority, missionary efforts, and imperial control had brought many pre-contact traditions, including tattooing, into decline. The marks that once covered women’s skin began to disappear, yet the practice itself never fully vanished. Jessie Oonark chose to honour it in her art, returning to it again and again throughout her career. Reflecting on her memories, she once said, “I remember when some of the women would have tattoos [...] They looked very pretty” [1].

1. Sandra Dyck, ed., Sanattiaqsimajut, 2009, p. 111

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