Irene Avaalaaqiaq/Myth and Reality. By Judith Nasby. (Montréal, MacGill-Queen’s University Press, 2002. Pp. xiv + 129, map, illustrations, photographs, appendices, ISBN 0-7735-2440-1.)

Irene Avaalaaqiaq was born about 1936-1941, an Inuk of Harvatormiuq group of Barren Ground peoples; she came to Baker Lake with her adoptive family in the 1950’s to escape famine, married here in 1956 and became a graphic and textile artist now of international renown. Nasby engages Avaalaaqiaq through an essay compiling excerpts from Avaalaaqiaq’s memoirs with skilled commentary composed from ethnographic (especially from Rasmussen’s 1931 report on the Fifth Thule Expedition), administrative, historical and art specialist’s resources to broaden context for the reader. Nasby follows Avaalaaqiaq’s plain style, but the choice of illustrations supplements Avaalaaqiaq’s graphics with a balance of ethnographic photos, family and community images, and some stark landscapes. These supply not only information but mood. Avaalaaqiaq’s memoirs, developed at Nasby’s request, are disarmingly fluent, matter-of-fact accounts, usually of personal and community experience, in which she describes food, hunger, hunting, family matters, and relates her experience to her art. Among these accounts she states in plain language the myths upon which her graphics and wall-hangings are based. Nasby declares Baker Lake is Canada’s only major inland Arctic settlement and is known for its sculpture, wall hangings, stone cuts, serigraphs, stencil prints, and coloured pencil drawings. Each artist expresses a singular vision, rooted in tradition and history, while living in the midst of a world affected by present and future technologies. Baker Lake was developed as a social services centre, in Federal response to the current famine, a consequence of the cyclic bloom and decline of the staple caribou population. For a native economy transformed from trade to wage principles, Federal officials conceived the development of traditional Inuit arts into sources of income. Probably first developed by James Houston and George Swinton, this fruitful policy proved viable; further, it enhanced community self-image and demonstrated the vigour of native traditions offered to an urbane market, old wine put successfully into new bottles. We may recall the brief undermining of the sculpture market in the late 1950’s by Asian imitations, to which the Inuit and their advisors responded by developing new media, stone prints for one, superbly and smoothly blending primal and European technologies. Avaalaaqiaq’s memoirs discuss her images, usually as a story or a reminiscence of a story. Her style is a skillful representation of natural speech; her rhetoric, whether oral or literary, is refined. She can take a grim chronicle rhythm or a jocular tone with equal laconic precision. Sometimes when a husband and wife are walking on the tundra, it is so quiet. Sometimes if they are not talking to each other, the husband will try to make his wife jump or the wife will try to make her husband jump, for fun, jokingly. Avaalaaqiaq recounts her vocation: It did. Avaalaaqiaq produces drawings, stencil prints and textile wall hangings, principally the latter. Favoured colours are red, black, white, deep blues and earth ochres. The latter are usually embroidered wool duffle and felt, sometimes with stroud. The figures, stitched with fine black thread and their borders usually outlined by course chainstitching worked by hand, appear in profile or frontally. The overarching theme of the imagery is transformation, mostly between animal and human forms, complicated by opposing isolation and threat to escape and help from spirits and animals. Borders, as in Figures 11, 14, 15, 16, 17, 22, 23, 26 and 27, are almost always loaded with chains of figures (or at least their heads). Apart from Nasby’s commentary, the field of visualization appears to represent the artist’s memory. Perhaps the borders of the textiles are one boundary between the physical Tundra and the Mind. This is an art of …