There is perhaps no other sculptor who so fully embodied the Kinngait “spirit sculpture” at its height in the 1960s, when the carving studios at Cape Dorset gave rise to some of the most arresting images in modern Inuit art, than Kiguak. He returned to the subject again and again, drawing from it some of his most memorable inventions.The sequence begins with Howling Spirit (Tornrak) and its Young of 1962, continues through Howling Transforming Spirit, c. 1963, sold by First Arts in the fall of 2021 for an astonishing CAD 120,000, and finds another important expression in Untitled (Spirits) of 1964 in the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts. The present work belongs alongside this esteemed lineage.

Its kinship with those sculptures is immediately felt in the face. Kiugak gives these beings a highly particular physiognomy, one that is at once monstrous and sentient, animated by mischief, alarm, aggression, and a kind of fevered awareness. The features are pushed, compressed, and shifted with exact intention so that the face hovers between the recognizably human and something less earthly. One feels in it a presence that is keenly alert, as though the creature were listening, scenting, and reacting all at once.

The eyes are among the clearest signs of this shared language. They are cut as narrow almond or ovoid slits, set slightly high, often weighted by a heavy upper contour. Their fixed stare has a sense of watchfulness, the concentrated intensity of a being inwardly possessed. The nose is equally economical. In these spirit works it is pared down to drilled nostrils, a short ridge, or a compact wedge, vaguely human and yet suggestive of snout or beak. Above all, it is the mouth that carries the emotional force. In each of these spirit carvings, the mouth departs from ordinary human expression and becomes the site of utterance, threat, or cry. In this work, it gathers itself into a tense, curling snarl, as though sound and breath had been forced into stone.

What gives these works their particular power is that their grotesquerie is never arbitrary. Kiugak controls distortion with remarkable discipline. The exaggeration is vivid, sometimes even slyly humorous, but never loose. These beings seem possessed of temper and voice. They appear capable of shrieking, taunting, or muttering. Their animation is theatrical in the best sense. They do not sit inert before us; they confront us as presences.

References: Howling Spirit (Tornrak) and Its Young is illustrated in Sculpture Inuit: Masterworks of the Canadian Arctic, (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1971), fig. 344 and on the front cover, and again in Darlene Coward Wight’s Kiugak Ashoona: Stories and Imaginings from Cape Dorset, (Winnipeg: Winnipeg Art Gallery, 2010), p. 77. Other thematically related works are reproduced in the latter volume on pp. 69, 83, and 85. See also George Swinton, Sculpture of the Inuit, (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1972; rev. 1992), fig. 481, and Gerald McMaster, ed., Inuit Modern: The Samuel and Esther Sarick Collection, (Toronto: Art Gallery of Ontario, 2010), p. 140.