Shuvinai Ashoona

Biography

Ashoona was born in 1961 in Cape Dorset, Nunavut to a family of celebrated artists. Her father Kiawak Ashoona was a sculptor, her mother Sorosilooto Ashoona was a graphic-artist and her grandmother Pitseolak Ashoona was one of the most acclaimed Inuit artists of her generation. She is also related to artists Napatchie Pootoogook, her aunt, and Annie Pootoogook, her cousin, with whom she was selected to participate in Oh, Canada a showcase of contemporary Canadian artists curated by Denise Markonish and held at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art in May 2012.

Artistic career

Ashoona's drawings are sometimes rooted in nature, but other times drawn from imagination, creating a claustrophobic, dense effect. Recurring images include the egg shape; the kudlik, a stone oil lamp; and the ulu, a round women's knife; historical images or events occasionally appear, like the Nascopie supply ship, which brought goods and people to Cape Dorset until its sinking in 1947. Setting Ashoona's work apart from the Inuit artists before her is a reflection of the blending of modern and traditional life in Nunavut.

Her first drawings in the Kinngait Studios archives — the internationally renowned printmaking studio founded by the West Baffin Eskimo Cooperative in 1959 — date from around 1993. Her early works were small, detailed, monochromatic landscape drawings, often depicting rocky, sparsely populated terrains from aerial perspectives. Her first major exhibition was Three Women, Three Generations: Drawings by Pitseolak Ashoona, Napatchie Pootoogook and Shuvinai Ashoona at the McMichael Canadian Art Collection in Kleinburg, Ontario.

She began using colour in her drawings in the early 2000s, portraying human figures, their shelters, and tools within graphic, imposing topographies, like in the work Composition (Sewage Truck) (2007-8) in the Samuel and Esther Sarick Collection of the Art Gallery of Ontario. Her work was exhibited at Art Basel in 2009, paired with the Saskatchewan artist John Noestheden, and at the Justina M. Barnicke Gallery at the University of Toronto, paired with the Toronto-based artist Shary Boyle.

In roughly 2009 Ashoona began working with a motif of worlds, drawing human, animal, and hybrid figures interacting with blue and green planets within fantastical settings, as exhibited in Shuvinai's World(s) at Feheley Fine Arts in Toronto, September 2012. She has exhibited most frequently with Feheley Fine Arts and Marion Scott Gallery in Vancouver.

Ashoona is the subject of a short documentary film titled Ghost Noise (2010), directed by Marcia Connolly and had the song "Walking in the Midnight Sun" dedicated to her by musician Kevin Hearn, who she painted a guitar for.