Ice Fishing
Annie Pootoogook, (b. 1969)
Cape Dorset, Inuit
Ice Fishing
Pencil, crayon on paper
2000 – 2001
20 x 19
Gift from the Edward J. Guarino Collection
In honor of Kathleen Guarino-Burns
2009.26.47
“I never thought that this is traditional way, and this is white style.”
Annie Pootoogook (Quoted in Campbell 2007, 16)
Annie Pootoogook is a third-generation Inuit artist from Cape Dorset, the most renowned artistic community in the Arctic. Since the 1950s, the Kinngait Co-operative has supported printmaking and drawing, providing income for the once nomadic community that now relies on a cash-based economy (Berlo 1989, 296).
Annie’s artistic lineage extends from her grandmother, Pitseolak Ashoona, and mother, Napachie Pootoogook. Her style of bold, dark outlining and bright colors, in conjunction with her subject matter (modern Inuit life), reflect the influence of her grandmother and mother, respectively. Annie achieves distinction in that she makes and markets her drawings as self-sufficent works of art, not as designs that she presents to the Co-operative to be turned into prints.
In Ice Fishing, Annie evokes time and place by a blue sky dotted with clouds, intersected by a mountain range, and a sliver of orange on the horizon. A man and two children are fishing on the vast expanse of ice, and this activity suggests a cycle of “life in constant transition” (Norton and Reading 2005, 29). On one hand, the subject suggests a time when the Inuit lived exclusively off the land. But the children’s brightly colored clothing indicates store-bought goods, not traditionally sewn animal skins. Like Inuit culture itself, Ice Fishing exemplifies a fusion of old and new influences.
Kristine Olson