In Big Woman, Oonark gives us a plenitude of feminine forms and finery. Here, two rose-red and white tudliit (hairsticks) tumble beside the woman’s face, which is otherwise left uncoloured save for the dense incised lines of her tunniit (facial tattoos). On either side of the head, paired ulus (women’s knives) flare outward in opposing directions, their orange and purple blades setting up a brilliant play of colour. Those same hues, joined by bursts of yellow, reappear in the amautiq, its kiniq (front flap), and the woman’s leggings. At the centre, a shock of bright yellow catches our eye and holds it.

Oonark’s gathering of objects associated with women has often been understood as a celebration of feminine display, and certainly the image delights in dress, colour, and ornament. Yet rather than simply surrounding her figure with decorative details, Oonark turns these familiar female forms into emblems, objects drawn from women’s lived experience and, at the sheer scale and frontal presence of Big Woman, these feminine emblems acquire real force. The tudliit, tunniit, ulus, and richly coloured clothing flare and crowd the sheet with signs of female identity, while the figure herself rises above them all, monumental, ornamented, and commanding in her presence. Even the small figure poised above her head adds to the abundance. In Grasp Tight the Old Ways, Jean Blodgett writes that the little splayed figure posed atop this Big Woman “may represent her thoughts of a child or a child in the amautiq behind, although a spiritual interpretation might also be possible” [1].

Oonark’s own explanation makes the image more compelling still. She revealed that it depicts,

…a woman who is turning into a stone, in Chantrey Inlet. The stone itself is really colourful because this woman has a fancy parka. She turned into stone because she never wanted to get married to anybody… [2].

Yet, Oonark gives us no sense of dread in this transformation, and certainly none of the dullness of colour one might associate with stone. The woman is immense, content and entirely at ease in her own presence, surrounded by the things that both define and adorn her. Her tudliit, ulus, tattoos and brilliant clothing remain with her as she passes into stone, so that transformation becomes less an extinction than a kind of splendid performance.

1. Jean Blodgett, Grasp Tight the Old Ways: Selections from the Klamer Family Collection of Inuit Art, (Toronto: Art Gallery of Ontario, 1983), p. 54.

2. As told to Marion Jackson in 1984, quoted in Maureen Flynn-Burhoe, “Jessie Oonark: Woman in the Centre” in Inuit Art Quarterly, (Vol. 14, No. 2, Summer 1999: 26-30), p. 28.

ND