This chapter is the text written by Danielle Printup for Study for Cradle. It is a minute long. 

A prominent multidisciplinary artist based in Southern Alberta, Faye HeavyShield is a member of the Kainai (Blood) Nation, which is part of the Blackfoot Confederacy. She has worked across media for over thirty years, often using a minimalist aesthetic approach to engage with embodied understandings of land, place and community.  

This drawing, titled Study for Cradle, was made to draft the design for a three-dimensional sculptural work she later made using cotton, acrylic paint, and grass. It exemplifies HeavyShield’s ability to use minimal forms effectively, evoking a child’s presence with subtlety and power.  

Move to the next stop. Continue on the path directly behind you, for 5 metres, crossing the gallery. The drawing is in front of you.

This chapter describes Study for “Cradle” by Faye HeavyShield, created in 1992, and measuring 61 by 47 cm. There is a tactile version of this drawing. It is labeled “5.” This chapter is one minute long. 

In this graphite drawing, the artist has sketched out a baby’s garment, similar to a blanket with a peaked hood. Though the hood is up and the garment is filled out as if there is a little body inside, the face opening is dark. HeavyShield has layered dark pencil markings so that it creates the effect of a deep, cavernous void inside. Surrounding the form is a long triangular shape in soft pencil marks, almost like a shadow. The fabric is unpatterned, a simple white. The title “Cradle” perhaps refers to a cradle board, made and used by Indigenous peoples to protect and hold babies on their mother’s back.  

To hear more about this work, play the next track. Or move to the next stop. Continue on the path directly behind you, for 5 metres, crossing the gallery. The drawing is in front of you.

This chapter is the text written by curator Sandra Dyck. It is two minutes long. 

Sandra writes:

The groundbreaking American writer Audre Lorde famously described herself as “Black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet.” Lorde rejected external definitions of her identity that singled out, or marginalized, any one of these categories. Her poetry, she said, “comes from the intersection of me and my worlds.”

These questions of the part and the whole, of identity and belonging, are central to the work that Gayle Uyagaqi Kabloona made for Drawing on Our History. Born in Qamani’tuaq — or Baker, as she calls it — to an Inuk father and a white mother, Kabloona has long lived away from the community. All her life, as she writes on these drawings, she has been asked, “What are you?” “Where do you belong?”

Kabloona belongs to making — to drawing, sewing, printmaking, knitting and building clay pots by hand. She belongs to the objects depicted in these drawings — sharp ulus with handles of wood or antler; a stone kudlik; a beaded sealskin marnguti that holds kudlik wicks; spherical ornaments made from ptarmigan gullets called puvviat — and to the creative acts that give rise to them. She belongs to her family tree, whose branches reach west to California and north to Inuit Nunangat.

Kabloona also belongs to the places she’s made home — Baker, Iqaluit, Ottawa. She belongs to the old stories she heard from her dad when she was a child. She belongs to the extraordinary legacy of visual culture inherited from Qamani’tuaq artists including Victoria Mamnguqsualuk (her grandmother), Jessie Oonark (her great-grandmother) and Luke Anguhadluq. Kabloona’s work comes from her intersection with all these worlds, and many more.

Please move to the next stop, which is in the High Gallery, or small arm of the “L.” Follow the path straight for 13 and a half metres. Then turn left and continue for 3 and a half metres. You are in the High Gallery now, with a 6 metre high ceiling. The drawing is on your left.

This chapter features an interview with artist Gayle Uyagaqi Kabloona. It is a minute long.

Hi Gayle, what is the inspiration or story behind your work in Drawing on Our History?

I chose to share a personal reflection of my identity in my works for Drawing on Our History. Figuring out my place in the world has taken a lot of work. I wanted to show that even though I’m “half Inuk and half white” the people I identify with and who have also claimed me back are Inuit. I live in the duality of being an Inuit person and also being “half”.

Why do you choose to use of Inuktitut in some of the titles of your work?

I choose Inuktitut words for the titles of some of my works and English for others to represent my background in the middle of two cultures and my language learning journey. Friends and family help me name the Inuktitut pieces: teaching me and bringing me closer to those people.

Why are you drawn towards being an artist?

I like the idea of sharing my experiences and finding connections with other people. I think art gives my life deeper meaning and fulfillment. Also, my brain is constantly busy with creative projects and I’m the type of person who needs to keep their hands busy.

Go to the next chapter to hear the curatorial label for Kabloona’s work. 

This chapter describes Ilakka by Gayle Uyagaqi Kabloona, made in 2023 and measuring 35 cm high and 20 cm wide at the base and 12 cm wide at the top. It is a minute and a half long.

Behind you and to your left, one metre away, there is a display case with three vessels of varying sizes. Ilakka is the largest! 35 cm high, if you were to run your hands up the sides from bottom to top, your hands would go out and in, out and in, four times, with the curves growing progressively small as you reached the top. They are slightly irregular, and the exterior has not been glazed, so the reddish-brown clay feels dry and slightly rough. Instead of an overall glaze, Kabloona dipped her fingertip in white liquid clay and pressed it on the vessel while still wet, making dots all the way around, top to bottom. There must be hundreds! Each dot has then been turned into a face using tiny black brushstrokes: two eyebrows, two eyes, two dots for a nose and mouth. The variations of the brushstrokes change the identical faces into an array of expressions: smiling, frowning, stern. To top it off, each face is encircled with small red dots, creating the bright ruff of a parka hood. Kabloona’s use of her own biometrics is a way of literally imprinting herself, and all who came before her, on this object. This is echoed in the title’s translation: “my extended family.” 

Go to the next chapter to hear Kabloona talk about her artwork.

This chapter describes a series of six drawings entitled You should be a part of us by Gayle Uyagaqi Kabloona, made in 2023. Each drawing is on a horizontal piece of paper measuring 25 x 35 cm. There is a tactile version of part of this drawing. It is labeled “4.” This chapter is two minutes long. 

There are six black ink drawings in Kabloona’s series “You should be a part of us,” hung in a row on the gallery wall. In each, bubble letters of text in both Inuktitut and English appear above and below a line drawing of an object from the artist’s home. 

As you progress along the drawings, it reads: When I was growing up, people asked “What are you?” that said “you don’t belong (you’re not part of us.)” In Nunavut, Inuit asked, “Inuugaviit?” that said “Do you belong with us?” (you should be a part of us).

The drawings are of objects used in everyday Inuit life. In the first drawing there is a collection of ulus, or curved women’s knives, used for cooking and sewing. Kabloona has shown the texture of the antler handles using wavy vertical lines. Her qulliq, a gift from her sister, is a stone lamp shaped like a semi-circle. The smoothness of the stone is contrasted with a knobbly texture of a taqqut, a stick made of willow root for adjusting the flames at the base of it. The wick for a quilliq is typically arctic cotton, dried moss and willow fluff. In one drawing, her hands pick apart this wick material, readying it for the qulliq. In another, she threads a needle. Her fingers and wrists have tattoos of fine black lines. This final drawing in the series has the tactile version. Feel the patterns of her tattoos, and the weight she gives the lettering. How do the Inuktitut syllabics feel in comparison to the English letters?

Go to the next chapter to hear about another work by Kabloona.

Gayle Uyagaqi Kabloona is an Inuk artist based in Ottawa, and was invited to be part of the exhibition by Sandra Dyck, Director of Carleton University Art Gallery. You can hear her written reflection on Kabloona’s artwork in Chapter 27. This chapter will give an overall description of the installation, and the next two chapter will describe two specific works. Then you’ll hear from Kabloona herself. This chapter is thirty seconds long.

Along the wall, there are six framed black and white drawings of objects from Kabloona’s home. There are also three vases in a display case. This section of the gallery is close to the stairs where you first came in, between two of the black floating walls.  

Go to the next chapter for information on Kabloona’s individual works.

This chapter describes Birds Carry the Sun to Birdland by Lucy Qinnuayuak, created in 1977, and measuring 38 by 47 cm. There is a tactile version of this drawing. It is labeled “3.” This chapter is one and a half minutes long. 

In this work, the sun is depicted as a charmingly irregular-shaped orange circle, held aloft in a yellow-green sky by nine birds. The colours are done with crayon, but the sun’s face is drawn in black ink, feminine eyes encircled by eyelashes gaze out at us, and her small mouth tilts to the right in a half smile. Her face has dotted lines across the cheeks, nose and forehead, in familiar designs of Inuit women’s tattoos. These black dotted lines also appear on the red, blue, green and black birds. 

Can feel the dotted patterns on the tactile version? 

Tattoos were opposed by Christian missionaries in the north for hundreds of years, something that Qinnuayuak, who lived between 1915 and 1982, would have experienced. They have had a revival recently, however, with many young Inuit women learning the techniques and designs of their ancestors. The directions of the birds, pointing east, west and north, create a symmetry to the drawings, and the black dots create kinship between the fowl and their precious cargo.  

Please move to the next stop, along the wall for 3 and a half metres, and turn to the left.

This chapter is the text written by Mckenzie Holbrook for Summer Landscape. It is a minute long. 

A founding member of the 1950s Toronto collective Painters Eleven, Kazuo Nakamura created artworks inspired by the New York abstract expressionist movement, as well as more figurative works. Nakamura viewed abstraction as a means to investigate and explore different modes of perceiving the natural world. 

The gestural, minimal brush strokes and muted colours of Summer Landscape bleed into the white expanse of the paper. As an artist interested in scientific ways of knowing, Nakamura portrayed the natural world as he saw it, unveiling the many ways beauty can be perceived. Here, Nakamura leaves viewers to fill in details; his loose gestural approach lends a moody, cool atmosphere to Summer Landscape. 

Please move to the next stop. Continue along this wall for 8 and a half metres. The drawing is on your left.

This chapter describes Summer Landscape by Kazuo Nakamura, created in 1954, and measuring 39 by 57 cm. It is a minute long. 

This drawing is hung above another landscape watercolour drawing by John Esnor. In Nakamura’s drawing, the artist used staccato brushstrokes of watercolour pigments to create a minimal, almost abstract, landscape scene of two trees standing on the left in a grassy field. Bright greens, vivid teal-tinged blues and hints of ochre are used to depict the leaves, grasses and smaller trees in the background.  Water makes the colourful brushstrokes feather out, as it soaks into the thick paper. It mimics the haze of summer heat that can sometimes blur your perception. Was the artist standing in this field while he painted it, the short and messy brushstrokes reflecting his rush to capture the colours and light of this view? Much of the page is left unfilled, and there are no details about the specific location. 

To hear more about this work, play the next track. Or move to the next stop. Continue along this wall for 8 and a half metres. The drawing is on your left.