Additional Images

Provenance:

Theo Waddington, London, UK, 1993

Note:

“The work of artists like Latcholassie and Parr is often referred to as primitive owing to its immediacy and directness and lack of convincing realism. Or, as Swinton preferred, these are artists concerned with ‘forms that are primary...Primary in that you can’t state it in a more simple fashion. Primitive means that it is untutored, unskilled and primary means that it is a distillation, it is the utmost’”. (116)

While Cape Dorset (Kinngait) sculpture is most known for its serpentine stone, in shades of brown through green, a light-coloured marble is also very popular. The marble ranges in colour from white to green and to salmon pink, and is quarried at Andrew Gordon Bay, 50 km east of Cape Dorset. A massive vein of this predominately white stone which runs across Foxe Peninsula, was found as an alternative to the traditional quarry at Markham Bay where the familiar green carving stone is found.

This hard white stone was used in the early to mid 1970’s. Its characteristic hardness makes it a difficult medium for the sculptors to work with the tools they had available and therefore the resulting pieces lack the detail typical of Cape Dorset sculptures. However, they have a mass and luminescence that make them unique among Cape Dorset sculpture.

In conversation with Bill and Mara as we packed up the art for shipping to Canada, Bill commented: “My children will be very sad to see this guy go”.

For a closely related work, see Waddington’s Auctioneers, November 2000, lot 287