Workshopped

In the mid-1950s, on the southwestern coast of Baffin Island, the artist and filmmaker James Houston saw Kenojuak Ashevak, a young Inuit artisan, walking along the beach with a sealskin bag on her shoulder. “It was not unlike other bags I had seen Inuit carrying,” Houston later wrote in Confessions of an Igloo Dweller, “but hers had something on it.” That something, she told him, was an appliqué design of a “rabbit thinking of eating seaweed.” After a few days, he brought pencils and paper to a community dance and handed them to Ashevak, asking her to draw the bag’s design. At this point, Houston had worked for the Arctic Division of Ottawa’s Department of Mines and Resources for a couple of years, with a mandate to develop a crafts industry. He would exceed expectations.

Ashevak went on to become the first woman to create a drawing for Kinngait Studios, which Houston established with the help of Kananginak Pootoogook, a printmaker. With their inaugural body of stonecut prints, released in 1959, Ashevak and her contemporaries gave rise to an industry that would come to drive their community’s economy, bolster Canada’s national identity, and tempt collectors worldwide. (In December 2024, a trial proof of The Enchanted Owl, Ashevak’s iconic image from 1960, which graces a Canada Post stamp, fetched a record $366,000.)

An astonishing 97 percent of drawings produced in Kinngait between 1957 and 1990 never hit the commercial market. Some 90,000 were stowed away, then entrusted to the McMichael Canadian Art Collection, in Kleinburg, Ontario. Despite nine exhibitions mounted throughout the ’90s, cutbacks, turnover, and “a general failure of will” left the collection dormant, according to the museum’s executive director, Sarah Milroy. Finally, in 2013, the institution began to digitize the work, and most of the pieces now live on a user-friendly website, Iningat Ilagiit, meaning “a place for family.”

Worlds on Paper is the companion text to a recent exhibition organized by Emily Laurent Henderson, the McMichael’s associate curator of Indigenous art and culture. The book documents a period of great change and contains an awe-inspiring perspective of our world, where penguins march beside pink, shamanic humans and where everything is alive, from airplanes and neighbourhoods to a pair of ears and the bridge of a nose. Beautiful, evocative, and complex, it’s part of the larger effort, Milroy says, “to liberate these works from their seclusion in our vaults and experience the vision of Kinngait artists without the influence of settler studio managers or marketers in the South.”

The hunter Parr started sketching in graphite after he sustained an injury in his late sixties. His drawings of harpoonists and industrious dogs tracking prey were influential for their depictions of traditional life at a time when the government was strong-arming his family and friends into fixed addresses. Some of Parr’s peers across the studio veered into mystical realms with composite figures and humans that transmogrify into creatures. Natsivaar portrayed a gaggle of mischievous spirits and peculiar things milling about, including a ghost with spindly arms wriggling out from its heads and a critter gazing back at its tail, which has grown a vexed, elvish face. With a softer, more intricate touch, Kunu depicted hybrid animals, one of which blends caribou antlers, narwhal tusks, a seal’s head and flippers on one side, and a vicious wolf on the other — and it’s being ridden by a ptarmigan.

Sorosiluto Ashoona, Pitaloosie Saila, and Qabaroak Qatsiya showcased other artists as they carved, drew, and sold their work, which marked a cultural transformation. Illustrations intermittently reflect the merger between Western and traditional life: A man stands in a pair of kamiik, or sealskin boots, near a stove. A traveller rummages through a qamutik while another waits beside a snowmobile. A woman clad in blue jeans and a yellow button-down waves in front of a house. Elsewhere, Inuit spirituality incorporates Western motifs. Propane stoves replace oil lamps, or qulliit. Harpoons become guns. One of Pudlo Pudlat’s untitled drawings depicts a crude Canadian flag flying atop a cargo ship carrying an enormous duck. Kingmeata Etidlooie casts a person as a utility pole with wires protruding from their head. A group by Kananginak Pootoogook encapsulates settler encounters: A priest baptizes a child in an igloo. A shirtless man dances to a record player. An affable dog peers at an RCMP officer, who dreams of shooting it (and, oddly enough, of a smiling toilet). The most devastating image belongs to Napachie Pootoogook, who, in 1981, drew a child with outstretched arms running away from the police while another grips their mother’s torso.

As much as it underscores colonialism’s influence, Worlds on Paper celebrates Inuit culture, parenthood, community, and well-being. It highlights unfettered traditions — ice fishing, berry picking, face tattooing, communal child rearing, and drumming among them. “I have come to see Inuit art in general,” Milroy writes, “not just as an expression of Inuit creativity, vitality, and ingenuity, but also as the by‑product of a people’s bid for survival in the unfamiliar world of settler capitalism. The story of Kinngait is thus a bittersweet success story.”

In a later part of the book, twelve writers each discuss a small body of work by a single artist. Jocelyn Piirainen explores Sorosiluto Ashoona’s “sense of whimsy that demonstrates her expansive imagination” and the stories she tells visually. “To create a more ‘realistic’ scene,” Ashoona added watercolour to her image of a woman going to a purple co‑op store to sell a sealskin. “While this is not realism in the Western art historical sense,” Piirainen writes, “it refers to a very specific period and moment in Inuit history.” Mark Bennett connects Japanese animals, films, and characters to Eliyakota Samualie’s bizarre “animal-to-spirit-to-human forms.” Some represent koi fish, he argues, and are reminiscent of kaiju, the Japanese term for “strange beast,” which also refers to King Kong and Godzilla. Qavavau Manumie, one of the few living artists featured here, provides an explanation for three drawings, including his depiction of a person scaling an igloo. It turns out that a man was looking for his gear to hunt a bird, only to have a polar bear climb on top of his home and damage it with its weight.

Henderson and her colleagues provide limited explanation of the types of materials artists used or why and when they used them. Paper and pencil were the most popular tools because they were relatively easy to transport, one section notes, but the origins of the genre’s trademark eclectic and unorthodox colour schemes receive shallow treatment.

Beyond the twelve essays (some rougher than others) and a scant introduction to each of eleven categories of images, the book leaves much of the art unexplained. This, however, can be forgiven. In most cases, the gathered material is untitled and dated within broad time frames. As Janice Grey, a writer from Nunavik, in Quebec, says of Aggeok Pitseolak, whose fantastical drawings go unnamed, “We are left to take in her work unassisted and form our own impressions, even when the piece appears to make no sense.”

In late 2021, when I was living in Iqaluit, I entered a raffle to buy one of the thirty-two prints from the annual Cape Dorset collection on display at the Nunatta Sunakkutaangit Museum. Although I was one of the last to receive a call, the illustration I coveted was still available: Pitaloosie Saila’s brooding Out of the Deep, in which a creature’s head surfaces from stormy, preternatural waters. I was hooked. A few months later, from a reseller in Toronto, I picked up Saimaiyu Akesuk’s Exuberant Spirit, a frenetic, polka-dotted portrait of what looks to be some variation of a groovy bird. When I got the two pieces framed, I even said yes to the fancy glass.

Today they hang in heavy contrast on opposite walls in my apartment in Toronto — not quite staring each other down on account of the bird’s cross‑eye. They’re titled, but I still look at them in wonder, knowing I’ve yet to uncover their depth. I’m reminded of how Mark Rothko described his Seagram Murals: “the scale of human feelings, the human drama, as much of it as I can express.” What would we guess at had he never offered that explanation — or expressed his disdain for the Manhattan restaurant where they were originally meant to hang? “There is true tension in the composition that stirs the imagination,” Grey writes of one Pitseolak drawing, which features an ambiguous being and a dog composed of stones, “but the true meaning remains a mystery.” In some cases, the only thing left to do is admire.