For most of her career, Omalluq Oshutsiaq was a carver. Read this article for free: Already have an account? To continue reading, please subscribe: * For most of her career, Omalluq Oshutsiaq was a carver. Read unlimited articles for free today: Already have an account? For most of her career, Omalluq Oshutsiaq was a carver.
Not only a carver, but an artist of international renown, one of the few female carvers from Kinngait, Nunavut, (formerly Cape Dorset) to garner such recognition. ● Curated by Darlene Coward Wight ● WAG-Qaumajuq, Giizhig Gallery ● On view until March 2025 Oshutsiaq, who was born in 1948, loved to carve women — women working, women supporting other women in labour, women giving birth. And then, in the 1990s, she severed a tendon in her wrist with an electric grinder, effectively ending her carving career.
But in 2013, at the encouragement of Bill Ritchie, then the director of Kinngait Studios, Oshutsiaq began to draw. With coloured pencils, she created vivid, hyper-detailed depictions of her everyday northern life, her childhood memories, as well as Inuit legends and stories. Through art, she processed the 2012 death of her husband and the loss of her ability to carve.
She spent the last year of her life putting it all down on the page. Oshutsiaq died from cancer in 2014 at age 66. In 2015, Darlene Coward Wight, curator of Inuit art at WAG-Qaumajuq, was visiting Dorset Fine Arts in Toronto, where she made an exciting discovery: a whole cache of Osh.
