Provenance:

Private Collection, British Columbia

Literature:

Marie Bouchard, Marion Tuu'luq, National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, 2002, pages 18-22

Note:

A pioneer of the medium, Tuu’luq recounted that “I was one of the first people to make wall hangings. I had made a bird and embroidered it with a stitch that made it looks like feathers, and then everyone was asked to make them like that. My sewing, my humble sewing, was chosen to be the example to follow…it was all on my own. There was nobody showing me how to do anything.” When the artist began selling her work, sewing was seen as lying somewhere between utilitarianism and decoration, less desirable than the work of carvers or printmakers. Over the years this view has changed, allowing the traditional sewing skills of Inuit women to be valued as fine art in their own right.

After initial experiments in colour, Tuu’luq began favouring dark backgrounds overlaid with more vibrant colours. She created dense compositions with motifs repeated in a way that nearly tipped over into abstraction, always bursting with visual complexity. In the words of Marie Bouchard, "her works on cloth speak eloquently about the artist’s fervent attachments to her homeland, about the patterns and rhythms of Inuit life, and about the power and pleasure of creating new spaces of discourse and imagination.“