For at least the last dozen years of his career, shamanic and demonic imagery became central to Ugyuk's sculpture. He returned again and again to figures caught between human, animal, and supernatural form, their bodies contorted through claws, horns, tails and other attributes of the Christian devil and demons.

Michael Scott wrote in The Vancouver Sun in 1998 that, although Ugyuk did not discuss his works, the artist had spoken in the past of his grief at the continuing erosion of traditional shamanistic knowledge [1]. According to Darlene Coward Wight, demon-like creatures began to appear in Ugyuk's sculpture in the mid-1980s, drawn directly from the Christian imagery brought north by missionaries [2]. For Ugyuk, this imagery was bound to the history of missionaries who had characterized Inuit shamans as devils, a history he brought back into view through his own sculpture [3].

These types of works are, then, the carved consequence of a collision between two systems of belief, in which the missionary's devil and the Inuit shaman become entangled within the same body. The figure once imposed upon the shaman as a symbol of spiritual corruption and evil is taken up by Ugyuk, transformed through his own sculptural language and ultimately reclaimed as his own.

Ugyuk does not discard the Christian image. Rather, he takes possession of it, appropriating the familiar attributes of Christian demonology and placing them within his own system of imagery. In the process, horns, claws, tridents, and other signs of the demonic are released from their original charge and given a new context.

The symbols remain recognizably Christian, yet their authority has shifted. Their meaning is no longer determined by the system that first imposed it. What was once used to cast the shaman as bad, alien, or otherwise 'other [4]' becomes, in Ugyuk's hands, an image shaped from within the shamanic world itself.

The present work, created around 1989, brings together the quintessential qualities of Ugyuk's finest shamanic and demonic sculptures. The horns, wings, and bow draw directly upon the visual language of Christian demonology, while the extraordinary physicality of the carving gives the being its particular force.

This figure is decidedly not standing, nor even obediently settled upon its base. It pitches and twists in a downward plunge, its legs, of which there are three, flaring upward as the torso buckles forward and the great head, tongues lolling from its mouths, projects dramatically to one side. Particularly compelling is the treatment of the head, which presents two distinct faces within the same figure, further unsettling any sense of a single, stable identity. The entire sculpture seems caught in a moment of extreme physical action, its limbs and implements reaching beyond the body to occupy and activate the space around it.

The effect is wonderfully unruly. Nothing settles into a conventional pose or proportion. Instead, Ugyuk makes the stone seem to twist, torque, and rear against itself, producing a creature of extraordinary physical force, strange beauty, and sculptural invention.

1. Michael Scott, “Window Shopping,” The Vancouver Sun, 2 July 1998.

2. Darlene Coward Wight, Art & Expression of the Netsilik, (Winnipeg: Winnipeg

Art Gallery, 2000), p.122

3. Ibid.

4. The term “other” is used in the sense developed by Edward W. Said in

Orientalism ([New York: Pantheon Books, 1978], pp. 1-28) and refers to the

construction of a culturally distinct subject as fundamentally different from, and

defined in opposition to, the dominant culture.

ND