Artist Info
Mary Yuusipik Singaqti
Born in 1936 in the remote Back River region, Mary Yuusipik Singaqti was raised as part of the last generation of Inuit to experience the nomadic way of living; relying on the caribou hunt. In 1954, Yuusipik’s father, as well as many in their community, died as a result of tuberculosis, his loss was felt deeply and without his hunting skills the family suffered. Yuusipik soon married Norman Sigaqti, the adopted son of Luke Anguhadluq and continued to live a traditional life of hunting and trapping. In 1964, Yuusipik became ill: hunting conditions had deteriorated greatly and she and her extended family were affected by famine and starvation, and they moved to the hamlet of Baker Lake, now known as Qamani’tuaq, to convalesce.
Yuusipik was a maker who worked in drawing and textile as well as sculpture, she and her 7 siblings all followed in the footsteps of their mother, Jessie Oonark, the artist-matriarch of Baker Lake, to become well-known artists as well. Yuusipik’s early carvings from the 1960s, such as the one in this exhibition are rare and small in scale; her later carvings from the 1980s are bigger. In the mid-1960s she began to make textile wall hangings for which she is well-known.
In later life, and for about 20 years, Yuusipik created autobiographical drawings including great detail of memories of her life on the land, conveying the strong sense of community and their pride of resilience and self-reliance she recalled from that time. Some of these drawings were represented in a solo exhibition, “Mary Yuusipik Singaqti: Back River Memories” at the Winnipeg Art Gallery in 2015. Yuusipik’s creative impulse was simply to illustrate her memories, The curator of the exhibition was told by the artist, ‘I want the younger generation to know about me, how we used to live [and] how life was before.’
