Napatchie
Ashoona
Inuit
Arctic Hunter
12" H
x 4 1/2" W
Napachie Ashoona was born
on October 10, 1974, in Cape Dorset, Baffin Island. He is a member
of one of the most prominent families of Inuit artists in Canada.
His grandmother, Pitseolak
Ashoona, was a famous printmaker, and so is his talented mother
Sorosiluto. His father Kiawak and uncle Kaka (now deceased) are
the two foremost Inuit artists.
Other well-known artists in
the family include their brothers Koomwartok (now deceased) and
Namonai, and their sister Napatchie, all three sculptors. Kaka's
son, Ohito Ashoona, has already become very famous for his carvings
of Polar bears, and his son Ottokie has followed the same artistic
path.
When Napachie was a small
child, he used to watch his father carving and occasionally would
help him sand or file. With a lot of patience and help from his
father, he soon learned how to handle the stone. Undoubtedly,
Kiawak had a very strong influence on Napachie, both in style
and thematically.
Like his father, Napachie
enjoys carving human body in action. With their expressive and
very detailed faces, and bodies in full motion, Napachie's hunters
and drum dancers are very reminiscent of Kiawak's work, but they
lack the Master's technical control in representing the volume.
Napachie has yet to explore the rich world of Inuit mythological
imagery , so present in his father's work.
Napachie carves in the local
stone called serpentine. It is a very hard metamorphic rock indigenous
to Baffin Island, with a structure similar to jade. The colour
of the stone varies from light green to brown or even black,
but like his father, Napachie prefers the darker shades.
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.