Etule Etidloie
Inuit
Waiting Wolf
10" L
x 4 1/2" H
Etule Etidlui was born on
June 15, 1946. He comes from a family of well-known artists from
Cape Dorset, the most art productive community on Baffin Island,
Nunavut.
He is the son of the late
graphic artists and carvers Etidlooie and
Kingmata Etidlooie. Etule's younger brother Kelly is also a very
talented sculptor, known primarily for his carvings of narwhals.
Omalluk Oshutsiak,
their sister, excels in small scale carvings of people. There
are several younger members of the family who are very gifted
carvers, Mary and Pitseolak Oshutsiak, Isaac Etidlui (Etulu's
son), and Toonoo Etidlui.
Etule is best known for his
delicately carved loons, often in flight, then mounted on either
stone or a piece of caribou antler, as well as for his refined
carvings of resting wolves. Etulu's style is highly representative
of Cape Dorset art.
It is rooted in a love for
naturalism, with an affinity for decorative stylisation. Etule's
carvings are made of finest serpenting of varying green shades
with gold veining, smoothed and highly polished to best exhibit
the beauty of the stone. Serpentine is a metamorphic rock found
on Baffin Island. It is a very hard stone with composition similar
to Jade.
Cape Dorset is located north
of Hudson Bay on the southwest tip of Baffin Island, well above
the treeline and just south of the Arctic Circle.
The Inuit inhabitants have
always called the area Kinngait (pronounced king-ite), meaning
"the place of hills," but it was named Cape Dorset
in 1631 by the British explorer Captain Luke Foxe, who mapped
the region during his unsuccessful search for the Northwest Passage;
he named it in honour of the Earl of Dorset, who had sponsored
the expedition.
Today, Cape Dorset is a modern
community of nearly fourteen hundred inhabitants in the newly
created Canadian territory of Nunavut.
