Shuvinai Ashoona

Crawling with tentacled creatures, flipper-footed beasts and beaked hybrids, Shuvinai Ashoona’s colourful pencil drawings are playful and fantastical depictions of Inuit life in the Canadian Arctic.

- Nevan Spier

My GG’s Camp (2022) – the first work of her solo show, ‘When I Draw’, at The Perimeter – portrays a family travelling over the ice on a dog sled, an imagined scene drawn from the nomadic past of the Inuit people of Kinngait, where Ashoona lives and works. Consisting of just over a thousand residents, Kinngait sits in the northernmost territory of Nunavut. It is home to Canada’s longest-running print studio, operated by the Inuit-owned West Baffin Cooperative since its formation in 1959. The remote settlement, previously known as Cape Dorset, is considered the most artistic community in Canada and the setting for Ashoona’s uncanny compositions.

The people and creatures that inhabit these large-scale works, each uniquely strange with their webbed fingers and lizard tongues, are hardly ever alone in the frozen landscape. As they gather to hunt, dance and pass the time, their striking features stand out against the Arctic tundra and the pale walls of their homes. In