Connecting the Dots

Through more persistent Googling, I came across four more art works, all miniature sculptures, by Canadian Inuits, that should be added to Chapter 5 in the book.

For starters, you can find a miniature brown streaked light grey-stone sculpture by Bob Barnabus of Ikpiarjuk (Arctic Bay), created in 1993-1994, and entitled “Lumak (Scene from the Legend of the Blind Boy and the Loon)” at the following link:

http://www.artnet.com/artists/bob-barnabas/past-auction-results

The second and third works are Mattiusi Iyaituk’s “Legend of Lumaaq” (from the late 1980s) and also his “Lumaaq and Her Adopted Whale Baby” (n.d.).  Both are abstract pieces made from stone with wood and/or ivory inserts.  Iyaituk, born in 1950, is a Nunavik Eskimo artist from the community of Ivujivik.  The two pieces may be viewed by clicking on the following links:

http://marionscottgallery.com/EXHIBITIONS/2006/200603-SUPR/17.php

http://www.waddingtons.ca/inuit-art/ItemView.aspx?id=14917

The fourth work I just discovered was created by the late Thomassie Kudluk (1910-1989) of Kangirsuk/Payne Bay, on the east coast of Nunavik.  “Lumak” is held by the Art Gallery of Ontario and can be seen at:

http://art.avataq.qc.ca/artists/gallery/thomassie-kudluk

Geographics-- I hope sometime soon to update my Map 2 (p. 98) showing where Inuit art inspired by the Blind Man and the Loon story is found, but really, adding these three communities just allows further confirmation of the story’s diasporic expansion into northeastern Canada.  Since oral variants of the Blind Man and the Loon have not yet been collected in these communities, they should be added to the list of other places with “invisible variants” (p. 96).

The Ivujivik and Kangirsuk-Payne Bay sculptures stem from logical connections between other nearby Nunavik peninsula artistic communities and increase its density and popularity there.

Even more interesting is the Barnabus piece.  Barnabus’s village of Ikpiarjuk is located on the northern end of Baffin Island, helps us see a pathway between Iglulik and Anjuittuq-Grise Fiord and thereby plots out the tale’s hypothetical dramatic northward expansion towards Greenland in Map 1 (p. 9).  This all goes back to my perspective in the book that storytelling can be understood as cartography (p. 154).