Created the same year as The Enchanted Owl, The Woman Who Lives in the Sun possesses the same arresting force that made Kenojuak one of the first breakout stars of Inuit art. Like The Enchanted Owl, it was issued in two colour states, the first in a dazzling, bright yellow and the second in orange-red. In the case of The Woman Who Lives in the Sun, however, the change was apparently unplanned, prompted only by the print shop running out of yellow ink.

Here, the anthropomorphized image presents the sun as a woman, easily distinguished by the hypnotic rows of lines that depict her spectacular facial tattoos. This conception may reach back to the Inuit narrative of a woman who, after discovering she had unknowingly lain with her brother, fled with a burning torch. Her brother chased after her, but his own torch went out, and in the end the two were transformed in the sky: she became the sun, he the moon. Yet the sun may hold such significance in the Arctic for a simpler reason as well: the sun’s association with life, light, joy, and abundance carries particular force in a region where its absence is felt for much of the year.

After her beloved Johnniebo’s death in 1972, Kenojuak suggested that this image, along with several others, had actually been drawn by him. Others close to the work itself were not persuaded. Terry Ryan, who bought the original drawing directly from Kenojuak, felt the style was plainly hers. James Houston seems to have felt the same. He admired the image enough to hang it above his own couch and, having been in Kinngait when it was made, attributed it to Kenojuak in his 1967 book Eskimo Prints. There, he writes,

Kenojuak records her vision of the woman who lives in the sun with strong solid color and boldly projecting rays. She gives the sun woman a bright hard smile and the chin tattooing of her people. A shaman, whom some said had the power to fly, told the people that both the sun and the moon belonged to women [1].

Fascinatingly, in her diaries, Rosemary Gilliat Eaton, who was in the Arctic on assignment for the National Film Board and photographed printmaker of The Woman Who Lives in the Sun with the very stoneblock (pictured), recorded the following:

After lunch Barb [Barabra Hines] washed her hair & collapsed into bed. I went over to the workshop & took some photos of Eeinidluk [Eegyvudluk Pootoogook] cutting a stone block of Kiashuk’s owls and hare. Lukta [Qiatsuk] was in the craft centre painting Sheowah’s [Sheouak Petaulassie] drawing of a sun with a face, on a prepared piece of stone - prior to cutting it. I fear he may not do this till Monday [2].

That note opens an intriguing possibility: perhaps Kenojuak was right to say the image was not hers, though not because it was by Johnniebo, but because it may have been by Sheouak instead. To our eye, the style still feels much closer to Kenojuak, but the question remains open and the evidence tantalizing.

Whatever its authorship, and regardless of discourse around the subject, the work has lost none of its force. Even now, more than sixty-five years after its making, it continues to complicate, reward, and deepen our understanding of early printmaking in Kinngait and this warm, blazing maternal sun is given a commanding presence: watchful, fully present, and powerful.

1. James A. Houston, Eskimo Prints, (Barre, MA, USA: Barre Publishers, 1967), p. 38

2. See Library and Archives Canada, Rosemary Gilliat (Eaton)’s Arctic diary, Image 332, digital record e011181043-332. 

The author notes that while this could simply be an error on her part, Gilliat was on assignment in the Arctic for roughly four months in 1960, and the publicly identifiable Library and Archives Canada records show at least four photographs each of

Kenojuak Ashevak and Sheouak Petaulassie. She was, therefore, in the author’s opinion not recording these women in passing but encountered both on multiple occasions, suggesting a degree of familiarity.

ND