Shuvinai Ashoona: Life & Work explores the meteoric rise of Canada’s most renowned Cape Dorset-based artist whose personal drawings of fantastical beasts and imagined worlds have challenged stereotypes of Inuit art and earned her international fame.

Shuvinai Ashoona is one of Canada’s most renowned artists, whose work has been celebrated domestically as well as in Australia, Europe, and the United States. In the publication Vitamin D2: New Perspectives in Drawing (Phaidon, 2013), Shuvinai is recognized as a member of a new generation of artists that engage with drawing in innovative ways. Her highly imaginative work combines aspects of traditional Inuit culture and mythology with influences derived from the non-Arctic world.

Born in Kinngait (Cape Dorset) in 1961, Shuvinai is part of a famed dynasty of artists that includes her grandmother Pitseolak Ashoona and her Sobey Art Award–winning cousin, the late Annie Pootoogook. In the mid-1990s Shuvinai began producing detailed, primarily monochromatic drawings depicting the natural landscapes and traditions of the North. By the late 1990s, however, her attentions shifted to fantastical creatures, dream-like landscapes, and aerial-perspective representations of a global community, expressed in vivid colour. Shuvinai Ashoona: Life & Work explores the world of an artist whose rich graphic imagery conveys an intricate and textured personal vision. Using pencil, pen and ink, and markers to render dense, highly imaginative drawings, Shuvinai creates art that reflects the intersection of values between the traditional and the contemporary in the North.

Shuvinai Ashoona
Life & Work
1st edition
By (author): Nancy G. Campbell Introduction by: Sara Angel
9781487101800
Hardcover
English
Mar 25, 2019
Active
11in x 8.5 x 0.5 in | 880 gr
128 pages
Art Canada Institute
The Canadian Art Library
BISAC:ART / Canadian