Sheojuk Etidlooie

In an artistic career that lasted only seven years, Cape Dorset’s Sheojuk Etidlooie (1929 – 1999) created an unusual and important body of works of paper. An artistic outsider who did not make her first drawing until she was sixty, Etidlooie evolved a highly personal style who chief characteristic bore little resemblance to the graphic modes and pictorial conventions favoured by her peers and colleagues in Cape Dorset. Though she based her images on such common Inuit themes as animals and everyday traditional objects, Etidlooie transformed these familiar motifs into strikingly minimal compositions that are remarkable both for their restrained suggestiveness and their abstract formal elegance.

Etidlooie was born in 1929 at an outpost camp on southern Baffin Island near Cape Dorset, then little more than a trading post. As many historians of the Canadian Arctic have observed, the 1930s and early 1940s were a period of relative cultural stability for the South Baffin Inuit. Though they had long been exposed to a range of influences from the South – the Hudson’s Bay Company started to establish a presence in the area around the same time – most of the region’s inhabitants, including Etidlooie’s parents, still led what was in many respects a highly traditional way of life. Families moved from one camp to another throughout the year, living in igloos in the winter and skin tents in the summer; men hunted walrus, seal and caribou according to the seasons; and women continued such traditional practices as piecing together clothing from sections of caribou hide. Etidlooie’s early experiences were rooted in this traditional lifestyle, elements of which would powerfully inform her art.

Etidlooie produced an upward of 460 original drawings during her career as an visual artist. The majority of these works were created using graphite and coloured pencils on sheets of paper measuring approximately 20 by 26 inches, though she did experiment with a variety of smaller formats as well. For so brief a career this is an impressive body of work, especially given the thoughtful care with which she generally conceived and executed her images. Her commitment to drawing generally and to her individual images speaks to the seriousness with which Etidlooie pursued her art.