Natural / Supernatural: Drawings by Nick Sikkuark

December 2, 2023 – January 6, 2024

Marion Scott Gallery is pleased to announce Natural / Supernatural: Drawings by Nick Sikkuark. Opening December 2 and continuing through January 6, the exhibition brings together 13 remarkable works on paper, all of which were produced in the last decade of Sikkuark’s life. Included are portraits, landscapes and works depicting supernatural creatures, each showcasing a different aspect of Sikkuark’s naturalistic and otherworldly concerns and sensibilities. The exhibition is timed to coincide with a major retrospective of the late artist’s work at the National Gallery of Canada.

In 2002, Sikkuark gave up a prolific carving practice, turning instead to drawing on paper, a medium he hadn’t used since the early 1970s. Over the course of the next several years, the Kugaaruk-based artist produced a sizeable body of drawings, extending his singular vision into a range of new and unexpected forms. The exhibition includes several human portraits, a subject that fascinated Sikkuark. Intended more as portraits of imagined personalities as opposed to representations of specific individuals, these works are marked by an intensity of detail rarely seen in Inuit art. The examples featured here range from a relatively naturalistic monochromatic portrait of a man in a traditional Inuit parka with his eyes shut, as though in a trance-like slumber, to a shaman with a penetrating stare, his carefully defined features rendered in ghostly grey pencil crayon on orange paper. Another work features the face of a wolf-like spirit hovering in the darkened sky surrounded by a multitude of Sikkuark’s trademark tiny disembodied swirling shamans.

Sikkuark’s graphic vision was unique among Inuit artists in the degree to which he made the northern landscape a subject of his art (his meticulously drawn images of the treeless northern terrain can be compared to those of the late Kinngait-based artist Itee Pootoogook). The exhibition includes a study, executed in oil stick, in which the landscape is Sikkuark’s sole subject. In this image, the artist pictures a collection of rocks stacked on top of each other in a formation recalling an Inukshuk, positioned on a section of land overlooking a blue sea free of ice. Other images show figures set within detailed landscapes. One work in the exhibition depicts a being with the body of a bird, hooves like a caribou and a human face running over a snow-covered expanse of land or sea ice, an overcast sky above and hills visible on the distant horizon. The creature’s multifaceted identity reflects another of Sikkuark’s principal themes: the ability of shamans to transform themselves into several different types of beings simultaneously.

Sikkuark’s last name means “thin ice” in Inuktitut, and many of his drawings are devoted to the subject of ice. In one small drawing, a man, his face encircled by a fur-lined parka hood, gazes out through a block of transparent ice, suggesting this substance’s paramount importance to the Inuit view of the world. More ominous in its implications is a portrait of a man whose face appears to be sculpted from ice (or snow). Positioned in front of a massive yellow burning sun, the man’s features are either melting in response to the welter or withstanding the incredible thermal pressure. Whichever interpretation is correct, the image, one of the Sikkuark’s last, speaks directly and inescapably to the current perilous state of the world’s ice in an ever-warming climate.