Annie Taipana

Born in 1931 in the Back River region north of the Arctic Circle, Annie Taipana was a member of the Utkusiksalingmiut (“people of the soapstone pots”). Originally known as Pikla, she grew up in a highly traditional milieu, learning the customs and skills of her people, who still lived semi-nomadically at that time, hunting and fishing for their food and clothing. While still in her teens, she married Jimmy Taipanak, a hunter and shaman healer who would later become a noted sculptor. The couple continued to live on the land with their children, but in the late 1950s widespread starvation resulting from poor hunting forced the entire family to relocate, along with other members of their group, to the inland community of Qamanittuaq (Baker Lake) further south. In the early 1980s, Taipana began making appliquéd cloth works (“wallhangings”) for sale to the local coop, joining the settlement’s impressive cadre of women textile artists. Unlike many of Qamanittuaq’s textile artists, Taipana has rarely made drawings, nor does she carve, suggesting that her practice is inseparable from the sewn medium in which she exclusively works.