Across the expansive visual culture of the Canadian Arctic, scenes of drum dancing appear with considerable frequency. Woman with Musical Instrument, however, offers a rather unique scene of music-making in the north.

The print was distilled from a larger graphite drawing in which the musician is joined by a dancing male figure [1]. The subjects are identified directly on the sheet, with "ᑕᓂᓯᑐ" above the dancer and "ᑕᐅᑎᒍᐊᑐ" inscribed above the seated musician, which identifies the instrument as a tautirut (tautigiatu). The tautirut is an Inuit bowed zither sometimes referred to as an Inuit fiddle and may have been introduced to Inuit communities by Hudson's Bay Company sailors from the Shetland or Orkney Islands, where related bowed instruments were familiar.

The woman's half open mouth and softly focused expression seem to place her in the midst of a song, while the bow traces a gentle arc across the instrument. We can almost imagine the scrape of the bow across the strings and the voice rising alongside it.

1. See Christine Lalonde and Leslie Boyd Ryan, Uuturautiit: Cape Dorset 1959-2009, (Ottawa: National Gallery of Canada, 2009), cat. 34, p. 36.

ND