Object Record
Images
Metadata
Artist |
Pootoogook, Annie |
Title |
Composition (Mother Knitting) |
Accession # |
017.1.1 |
Medium |
Colored pencil, pencil & ink |
Support |
paper |
Dimensions |
W-26 L-22 inches |
Description |
Biography: Annie Pootoogook (1969-2016) was born in Cape Dorset, Nunavut. She began drawing in 1997 and although she did most of her work at home she was a steady presence at the Kinngait studios during the early part of her career. Pootoogook was an instinctive chronicler of her times whose drawings reflected her experience as a contemporary female artist living and working in the changing milieu of Canada's far north. Although firmly rooted to the specifics of her time and place, she managed to transcend cultural boundaries and present the details of her everyday life in an engaging way, inviting the viewer into both her public and private worlds. Annie had her first one person show in 2002 and was represented in several successful exhibitions during her career. She spent the summer of 2006 in Dufftown, Scotland where she was artist-in-residence at the Glenfiddich Distillery "Spirit off Creativity" program. Following a solo show at the The Power Plant gallery in Toronto, she went on to win the prestigious Sobey Arts Award in October and subsequently went on to exhibit at the Basel Art Fair and Documenta 12 in Kassel Germany. Her drawings are in the collections of the National Gallery of Canada, the Art Gallery of Toronto and several other notable institutions. Annie was the subject of a critically acclaimed documentary film by Site Media and her work has been shown in numerous public galleries in Canada and around the world. Description: This work is one of Pootoogook's renowned domestic interior scenes, depicting a woman knitting on the couch as she watches over her young child. Pootoogook depicts modern Inuit life as she sees it, rather than producing the traditional scenes that people in southern Canada have come to expect. There is tradition in Pootoogook's work, however. It is the Inuit concept of sulijuk, meaning when something "is true or real." Her focus is on scenes of prosaic domestic tranquility as well as domestic abuse - her own and that of other Inuit women - mental illness and alcohol abuse. Living in Cape Dorset, Baffin Island, Pootoogook is described as a chronicler. Pootoogook, herself, comments that her work is based on "emotional" or "difficult" incidents that she has seen and she wants to "show that [in her art]." Each drawing, she adds, "depends on how she is feeling" and "if there has been a good or bad time." Her artwork is a safe venue for her emotions, her interior spaces, to be expressed. Realized with coloured pencil on paper, her stark images reveal Inuit life as it adapts to accommodate southern culture within a still relatively closed society. |