Pudloo Samayualie
This drawing, aptly titled Sculpture That I Saw in New York (2016), was created following the artist’s 2016 residency at the Brooklyn Museum and captures a 2002 sculpture by celebrated Ivujivik, Nunavik, QC, carver Mattiusi Iyaituk. The original work, Wearing Her First New Shawl, was spotted by Samayualie at a nearby commercial gallery. After photographing the piece, Samayualie began the drawing when she returned home to Kinngait (Cape Dorset), NU. In a wry twist on the Kinngait Studios artist’s longstanding practice of drawing from photographs, namely landscapes and local flora and fauna, this piece features the added layer of illustrating the artistic creation of a fellow Inuit artist, from another region, in an alternate medium.
The resulting work on paper is demonstrative of Samayualie’s signature visual language— defined line work, textured applications of coloured pencil and a well-considered perspectival approach that maximizes movement and dimensionality and often makes strategic use of architectural elements such as windows and posts, or in this case, the slight lean of a central axis. Here, Samayualie faithfully renders Iyaituk’s curving, gestural arms, the incised buttons
(or are they stitches?) and the stacked, slightly askew, multitoned stones to reveal, or rather to recreate, a charming portrait of an unnamed subject.