In a 1995 article, Louis Gagnon presents Peter Morgan as a strikingly original artist whose caribou antler carvings never received the attention they deserved. He describes Morgan, of Kangiqsualujjuaq, as developing a distinctive visual language marked by animated engraved surfaces, bold outlines, black inlaid eyes, and compact forms charged with energy. Gagnon also notes that birds were among Morgan’s earliest subjects and Morgan recalled that when he began carving around 1964, he made “mainly small birds, polar bears and seals.”

Undoubtedly for the qualities Gagnon identified — boldness, crispness of form, and striking originality — as well as for their sheer charm, Morgan’s nests of fledglings awaiting a parent became especially sought after by collectors. As in the finest examples of this subject in the artist’s oeuvre, here, the birds are carved from antler, while the “worms” held in the parent’s beak are rendered as strips of hide. Most ingenious of all, the nest itself is fashioned from the skull cap of a caribou, with the truncated antlers serving as its support.

ND