Janet Nungnik Global Warming
For all its wavy lines and fantastical imagery, Global Warming (2019) reads like a map—a compass pointing nor th radiates out of the centre, with a subtle X following the ordinal directions out to the edges of the felt. The map’s border is denoted by highly textured white, yellow and green landmasses that ring the wallhanging.
This map’s legend, however, is not a glossary of symbols but rather two figures the Qamani’tuaq (Baker Lake), NU, tex tile ar tist Janet Nungnik has superimposed on top. The figure in orange dances as concentric rings of thread form a sunny yellow drum. Below, two blue hands reach out of the negative space to cross the land, as if to protect it—from the beating rays of the sun, or from the noise of the drum? The other figure watches, wearing a white amauti decorated with an image of planet Ear th. Nungnik’s tiny stitches, at taching the white applique to the felt, mirror the lines of trim on real amautiit. In the figure’s right hand is a bucket labelled “NEWS.”
There’s a sense of urgency in this wallhanging, an imminence that is at odds with both the slow, methodical way a sewer must stitch it together and the slow, steady progression of global warming. Even for an ar tist as proficient as Nungnik, this piece would have taken hours to construct, every detail requiring thought and a fur ther expenditure of time and energy. From the swirling orange current in the water to the white dots just below the compass, each component is par t of the map of how climate change is transforming the Arctic.