An accomplished printmaker, Pitseolak Niviaqsi was one of the key lithographers at the Kinngait studio, credited in almost every Cape Dorset Annual Print Collection from 1975 to 2011. The demands of the print shop absorbed much of his working life and his sculptural output was, consequently, comparatively small. What survives in that body of work, however, is highly distinctive. As in the best of Niviaqsi’s sculpture, the present work is defined by long, sinuous silhouettes, finely judged balance, and generous passages of open space. The serpentine form of Caribou and Young at Play and its shifting interplay of solid and void reveal the artist’s fascination with the language of gesture.

Here, the pair reads almost as a pas de deux [1], the two animals caught between contact and release, each movement answered by the other. Their bodies stretch, rise and counter one another with extraordinary suppleness and care. The adult caribou rears high on its hind legs, its body drawn into a long ascending curve, while the smaller calf lifts beneath it in counterpoint. The adult’s sweeping antlers and the backward thrust of the calf’s head carry the composition outward in broad, branching arcs.

The pair appears to be engaged in a moment of playful contest but in Niviaqsi’s hands the encounter becomes almost balletic, a poised exchange of pressure and release. Their forelegs cross and separate, opening keyhole-like pockets of space between the bodies and lending the group an extraordinary sense of suspension and, for a moment, stone seems to shed its weight.

1. A French dance term meaning literally “step of two.”

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