Qavavau Manumie at 259 Lake Shore Blvd E

“I enjoy the animals and the land, and I take what I see there to my drawings.” Manumie’s drawings of hybrid forms and entanglements—including sea creatures freeing one another from nets—are his way “of creating completely new places and strange activities that maybe trick the people who look at [them].” Manumie has worked in the printmaking studio in Kinngait | Cape Dorset since 1988. Along with representations of the sea, a recurring subject for Manumie are the Inugagulligaq, those referred to as “the little people.” The subject of stories relayed to Manumie by his father, Inugagulligaq live within Inuit society, but remain largely unseen.

Transformation is a recurring theme in Manumie’s practice, suggesting a relationality between the human and animal worlds as well as between nature and technology. In his drawings, a whale becomes a massive ship, with a hull and a mast in place of a dorsal fin; a woman rests on a bed of kelp with a fin for legs, and birds and fish are intermingled with hooks and harpoons, suggesting the interdependence between their lives and those of the people that they feed. With transformation there is also potentiality—a little person holds two large bird wings in each hand seeming to contemplate the possibility for flight, or the potential to become another being.

This project is made possible with generous support from West Baffin Eskimo Co-Operative.