Additional Images

Provenance:

The Red Pederson Collection,
Waddington's, December 1981, Lot 116P
Private Collection, Toronto

Literature:

The Pedersen Collection, presented by Northern Heritage Native Art, illustrated, undated, unpaginated

Note:

“The seals we get around Coppermine don’t normally travel in herds. But occasionally - I’ve had the experience four times in my twenty-five years - you can find yourself in the middle of three or four hundred of them. It’s so overwhelming you think, ‘I’m hunting them but what if they should suddenly turn around and decide to hunt me? I wouldn’t have a chance.’ Charlie showed me this piece about three months after it had happened to us in the straits off Victoria Island. When he brought it in he said, ‘I was thinking about that time. I don’t know about you but I found it sort of scary. I thought about what it must have been like in the old days, in just a skin kayak.’”

As Pedersen recounts, seals, when wounded or threatened, will attack a kayak under the water. To capture the excitement of this act of vengeance, the artist has produced a deliberately unsteady piece to simulate the harrowing hunting scene.