Artist-generated repairs are not uncommon in Joe Talirunili’s sculpture and, according to published accounts, the artist himself was known to reattach broken elements using all manner of readily available materials.

Surely, this ingenuity came from Joe’s own upbringing on the land, where mending something broken, so long as it was not beyond repair, was simply a matter of ordinary intelligence. He came from a world in which material knowledge, maintenance, and adaptation were woven into daily life, not set apart as special acts. If something breaks, you save it if you can. You use what is at hand, and you do not necessarily need to chase invisibility. You restore function, preserve effort, and keep going.

The present work preserves one of the most quintessential and ingenious such repairs we have seen, with Talirunili’s resourcefulness fully on display. During its making, the elongated, somewhat delicate legs must have given way. Rather than abandon the carving, Joe bored through the stone on either side of the fractures and laced the legs back onto the torso with waxed string, the front two openings were then reinforced with fitted stone plugs. The repairs, then, are not a condition issue to be regretted, but part of the work’s history and even its identity.

References: For discussion of Joe’s mends, see Marybelle Myers [Mitchell], ed., Joe Talirunili: “A grace beyond the reach of art,” (Toronto: Herzig Somerville Limited, 1977), p. 5 . Jean Blodgett likewise acknowledges Joe’s mending practices in Jean Blodgett, Grasp Tight the Old Ways: Selections from the Klamer Family Collection of Inuit Art, (Toronto: Art Gallery of Ontario, 1983), p. 208.

ND