Before her artistic brilliance moved to paper, Pitseolak Ashoona’s early career already revealed a strikingly experimental imagination in cloth. After settling in Kinngait, she joined the arts and crafts programme introduced by the Houstons. In Pictures out of My Life, she recalled,

At first, after Sowmik [James Houston] came, I did lots of sewing. I made parkas and duffle socks with designs. Lots of women began to work — any kind of women so long as they could sew. I used to embroider animals and all kinds of living things [1].

Very few examples of this early textile production survive. Christine Lalonde has noted a “rare embroidered pictorial work on cloth from the 1960s,” presented by Alma Houston to George Edwin Bell Blackstock, the Canadian Consul in New Orleans [2]. Though few such works survive, both that gifted example and the present textile are significant for the way they foreshadow the sensibility of Pitseolak’s later works on paper, the medium that would bring her international renown [3].

These rare textiles can be seen much like Kenojuak Ashevak’s early sealskin appliqué works: not as side notes, but as the first stirrings of a graphic language that would later bloom on paper. In both cases, the achievement on paper did not arrive out of nowhere but emerged from an already inventive engagement with sewn work as a pictorial tool.

Here, in Untitled Work on Cloth (Life on the Land), we encounter Pitseolak plotting how her images might be built across a surface through repeated motifs, sharp colour contrasts, and bold, clear arrangement.

Likewise, the comparison to her later drawings is especially compelling because the same visual habits are already present. The forms are built from essential lines, with figures reduced to clear, memorable silhouettes. The motifs are just as telling in that already this embroidery has Pitseolak’s distinctive way of building a world from recollected essentials. As in her drawings, we find hunters, women at work, tents and igloos, kayaks, animals, and especially birds. These are the subjects Pitseolak would return to again and again: not as spectacle, but as the remembered substance of life on the land.

1. Dorothy Eber and Pitseolak Ashoona, Pitseolak: Pictures out of my Life, (Montreal / Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1971), p. n73.

2. Christine Lalonde, Pitseolak Ashoona: Life and Work, (Toronto: Art Canada Institute, 2015, e-publication), p. 54.

3. The other example, gifted to the Canadian Consul in New Orleans, is reproduced as a detail in ibid., p. 55.

ND