Elisapee Ishulutaq: My World

Softcover, 96 pages
McMichael Canadian Art Collection, 2022
Sarah Milroy, Darlene Coward Wight, John Geoghegan, Tarralik Duffy

For nearly fifty years, Elisapee Ishulutaq (1925-2018) documented her Inuit way of life with great warmth, liveliness, and invention. Embracing the varied media of printmaking, weaving, and sculpture in her early career, she recorded scenes of traditional Inuit camp life as she and her family had lived it in southeast Qikiqtaaluk (Baffin Island), her later days in the community of Pangnirtung, and the stories told to her by elders, Ishulutaq's later, culminating works in oil stick, which she began making in her mid-eighties, explored these themes in a fresh way, and on an often grand scale. Here, as in her smaller oil stick works, Ishulutaq recorded the dramatic topography of her region, the traditions of her people, as well as the changes and challenges they faced, all in a new vibrantly colourful and boldly simplified visual language, bearing witness to a time of extraordinary transformation. This is the first publication to celebrate Ishulutaq's remarkable art and life, featuring contributions by the scholars Darlene Coward Wight and John Geoghegan and the Inuk writer and artist Tarralik Duffy.