Inuit art

Historically, their preferred medium was walrus ivory, but since the establishment of southern markets for Inuit art in 1945, prints and figurative works carved in relatively soft stone such as soapstone, serpentinite, or argillite have also become popular.

[6] Around 1000 CE, the people of the Thule culture, ancestors of today's Inuit, migrated from northern Alaska and either displaced or slaughtered the earlier Dorset inhabitants.

[7] Thule art had a definite Alaskan influence, and included utilitarian objects such as combs, buttons, needle cases, cooking pots, ornate spears and harpoons.

The graphic decorations incised on them were purely ornamental, bearing no religious significance, but to make the objects used in everyday life appealing.

All Inuit utensils, tools and weapons were made by hand from natural materials: stone, bone, ivory, antler, and animal hides.

In the 16th century Inuit began to barter with European whalers, missionaries and other visitors to the North for tea, weapons or alcohol.

Items previously produced as decorative tools or amulets for the angakkuq (shaman), such as carvings of animals and hunting or camping scenes, became trade commodities.

Inuit artists also began producing ivory miniatures specifically as trade goods, to decorate European rifles, tools, boats, and musical instruments.

[8] The Government of Canada's encouragement of commercial carving was initially heavy-handed, as is most clearly shown by the pamphlet "Eskimo Handicrafts", circulated among Inuit communities in the early 1950s.

The West Baffin Eskimo Cooperative was founded in Kinngait in 1959 and became the primary purchaser of arts and craft items.

[9] James Archibald Houston, who had helped attract the attention of the Canadian Handicrafts Guild to Inuit carving in the late 1940s, travelled to Kinngait, then called Cape Dorset on Baffin Island in 1951 and introduced printmaking to the artists' repertoire there.

[13] Tillirnannqittuq means "unexpected" in Inuktitut,[13] and the show featured Kenojuak Ashevak, Lucy Qinnuayuak, Niviaksiak, Osuitok Ipeelee, Kananginak Pootoogook, and Johnny Inukpuk.

[16] Inuit clothing has long been a means of artistic expression for Inuit seamstresses, who historically employed decorative techniques like ornamental trim and inlay, dye and other colouring methods, decorative attachments like pendants and beadwork, and design motifs, integrating and adapting new techniques and materials as they were introduced by cultural contact.

The most common material is now soapstone, serpentine, either deposits from the Arctic, which range from black to light green in colour, or orange-red imports from Brazil.