Pitseolak Qimirpik
Artist Biography c/o Jessica MacDonald, Inuit Art Quarterly
Sitting at the helm of a surging generation of Inuit artists who are reconfiguring their position onto history, traditional media, and narrative figuration, Pitseolak Qimirpik (b. 1986) is known for the way he fuses pop-culture signifiers with traditional carving. Based in Kinngait (Cape Dorset), NU, Qimirpik learned to carve by observing and assisting his father, the renowned sculptor Kellypalik Qimirpik, and first took up his tools at age thirteen.
Qimirpik presents his sense of humour through playful depictions of northern fauna, with walruses that joyfully kick their flippers up and rabbits that dance to hip-hop music. In his blend of traditional Inuit carving techniques and new technology, power tools make frequent appearances, as both Qimirpik’s carving implement of choice and as subject matter. Qimirpik’s stone sculptures have often been noted for a palpable sense of joy—whether they feature dancing bears and walruses or pop culture icons like Nintendo’s Mario, Marge and Homer Simpson, or a young man dancing with an iPod. The artist from Kinngait, NU, has been working with stone since he was just thirteen, but in 2021 he began to create vibrant coloured pencil drawings that pop off the page, bursting with eclectic figures and forms.
The transition from sculpture to drawing is more linear than one might think. “I drew a lot in school,” Qimirpik says, emphasizing that although his public-facing work has been sculptural for decades, drawing has always been part of his planning process. He calls the transition from two-dimensional sketches to three-dimensional pieces a “transformation” he enacts as the sculptor.
Qimirpik’s drawings are densely layered and shaded. “I press very hard and I colour for a very long time,” he says of the colour payoff he is able to achieve, solid blocks which often look more like marker strokes than the usually delicate hues associated with coloured pencils. His contemporaries at Kinngait Studios, such as Ooloosie Saila and Saimaiyu Akesuk, are able to achieve similar effects but use their powers more sparingly, balancing patches of intense colour with blank negative space on the page. Qimirpik, by contrast, typically fills every part of the page.
“Harder is better—that’s why I do it,” Qimirpik laughs, agreeing that the muscles he’s obtained from working with stone are likely a factor in how much pressure he is able to apply. Working with coloured pencil lets him access a range of colours he’s unable to achieve with stone, bringing another layer of joy to his forms.
Qimirpik’s success in just a few years of drawing publically has resulted in several solo exhibitions in the last 18 months—at The Java Project in Brooklyn, New York; at Madrona Gallery in Victoria, BC; at Feheley Fine Arts in Toronto, ON; and at Galerie C.O.A. in Montreal, QC—as well as back-to-back inclusions of his work as prints in the 2023 and 2024 Cape Dorset Print releases. While Qimirpik hasn’t yet been able to travel to see his shows in person, he hopes to make it to Gwangju, South Korea, this year to see his work in the exhibition Home and Other Places (2024) at the Gwangju Biennale, where it is featured as part of a cross-cultural collaboration between six artists from Kinngait and three from Korea, featuring large wall murals, drawings and mixed-media installations.
Many artists from Kinngait Studios and beyond have worked in both drawing and sculpture—renowned graphic artist Kenojuak Ashevak, CC, ONu, RCA (1927–2013), for example, produced a number of sculptures in her early career, as did Kananginak Pootoogook, RCA (1935–2010) and later on Jutai Toonoo (1959–2015)—but none have actually fully merged sculpture with colour drawing, an entirely unique component of some of Qimirpik’s newest work.
In a series of sculptures that appeared in an April 2024 exhibition at the Kenojuak Ashevak Cultural Centre in Kinngait, he used archival acrylic markers to “colour in the carvings,” drawing yellow stars and fish across several transformation scenes and enveloping a small pair of stone flowers in their true-to-life colours for the top of a bone piece. “I was trying to do something different,” he says. With these pops of colour, Qimirpik imbues the stone pieces with even more joy than he would be able to achieve with shape and texture alone. When asked what’s next, Qimirpik is equally as prosaic in his answer as he was when explaining how he got where he currently is: “I plan to do [art] all my life,” he says.
SOLO EXHIBITIONS:
Oct – Dec 2014
Pitseolak Qimirpik - The Eskimo Gallery Toronto, Ontario
April 2020
Pitseolak Qimirpik: Phantasmagoria - Feheley Fine Arts Toronto, Ontario
June — July 2023
Pitseolak Qimirpik: Whimsy - Feheley Fine Arts Toronto, Ontario
Dec 2023 — Jan 2024
Pitsiulaq Qimirpik Java Project (curated by Peter Kelly) Brooklyn, New York
March 2024
Pitseolak Qimirpik - Madrona Gallery Victoria, British Columbia
COLLECTIONS:
TD Gallery of Inuit Art
Crown-Indigenous Relations & Northern Affairs Canada
Doris McCarthy Gallery (University of Toronto Scarborough)
