A rare look at Cape Dorset’s hidden art treasures

Print-maker Qavavau Manumie applies ink with a roller to a slate etching of Tim Pitsiulak’s “Livesafer Edna” at the Kinngait Art Studio in Cape Dorset March 30. (PHOTO BY THOMAS ROHNER)

Blocks of bawdy songs found by Ritchie, typeset in blocks of syllabic fonts in the 1960s. (PHOTO BY THOMAS ROHNER)

A print by Shuvenai Ashoona. (PHOTO BY THOMAS ROHNER)

Carvings inside the print studio’s storeroom. (PHOTO BY THOMAS ROHNER)

CAPE DORSET — Hidden away inside Cape Dorset’s famed print-making studios are little-known tidbits of Baffin history and some juicy surprises.

For example, a tour of the studios reveals bawdy and erotic Inuit songs, a language found nowhere else on earth and archived prints deemed too racy for the general public.

Bill Ritchie, a master printmaker who has managed the studios for over 20 years, along with assistant manager Joamie Tapaungai, recently led Nunatsiaq News on a tour.

“This is where it all started, the very first print shop,” Tapaungai said, standing in a small square room — about 20 feet long on each side — attached to the stone-cutting studio.

James Houston began Cape Dorset’s print-making studio in about 1958 in what was then the biggest structure in the south Baffin community, Tapaungai said.

“Inuit until then had only seen the inside of igloos, so this was a big building. They’d hold dances in here. People would wait outside, take turns coming in,” he said.

A local carver and stone-etcher approached Houston and asked the Ontario-native how images were printed on cigarette packages —  “That’s when all the print-making started,” he said.

In 1959, when Canada was first introduced to a print collection from the Kinngait community, local artists used homemade tools and prints made from soapstone etchings, Tapaungai said.

Today, the studio uses slate recycled from pool tables, which doesn’t chip as easily as soapstone, and rice paper imported from Japan.

And local artists submit somewhere between 300 and 500 drawings in hopes that their work will be among the 30 to 40 chosen for the annual print collection, released each October.

Inside the stone-print studio, in a room beside the one built by Houston, longtime print-maker Qavavau Manumie bends over an etching of Sedna rescuing a human, carefully applying a blue-green ink.

“Some things have changed since the beginning, for sure. Right now, it’s moving fast — too fast. We’re really busy,” said Manumie, who has been working at the studio for nearly 30 years.

In a room off the stone-print studio, Ritchie explained that a local worker, Paulie Saggiak, was buffering a huge slab of stone workers refer to as “lithostone.”

“The hardest thing when you’re teaching people in Inuktitut is that there aren’t any Inuktitut words for any of the chemistry or processes… so the guys have invented their own language and teach each other,” Ritchie said.

A combination of Inuktitut and English science jargon, the language workers in the stone-print shop use is probably one-of-a-kind in the world.

“So every time we lose one of these guys, whether they quit or retire or die, it’s an enormous legacy we lose.”

On the other side of the same room, a number of etching and printing-press machines sit idle, some covered by tarps.

This building was originally intended in the 1960s to publish books using Inuktitut syllabics, but never took off, Ritchie said.

Still, the press did produce the first books published in syllabics in the Baffin region.

And Ritchie said he discovered blocks of syllabics arranged into short stanzas shortly after taking his post.

Local elders translated the blocks, Ritchie said.

“They were these sexy, crazy sense of humour songs, about genitals and boobs. That’s why they were never printed, likely.”

One elder, while translating, began singing one of the songs, so clearly some Inuit knew the songs, Ritchie said.

“When Christianity was introduced here, it was really beaten into people’s heads that this is bad, you shouldn’t be doing stuff like that. But now people are trying to embrace old ideas again,” he said.

Across the street from the stone-print studio, printmaker Niveaksie Quvianaqtuliaq explained the process for making prints from aluminium etchings.

Artists, using a special pencil on a certain type of plastic, draw an image which Quvianaqtuliaq said he takes into a photographic dark room.

“The aluminium plate has pre-mixed chemicals, so in the dark room I expose the plate and that transfers the image onto the plate,” Quvianaqtuliaq said.

That exposure actually etches the image into the plate, he explained, which is then ready to have ink rolled on to it.

Quvianaqtuliaq said he started at the studio in 1990 as a job-placement program from high school.

“Bill Ritchie liked my work, so he hired me after that… It’s a lot of labour involved, but I like my job,” he said.

Behind Quvianaqtuliaq’s workbench hangs a large rectangular drawing representing the Inuit legend of Kiviuq, by local artist Ningeokulu Teevee.

The drawing is an example of brilliant work not fit for the Cape Dorset print collection, Ritchie said.

The picture, for example, shows what appears to be a penis floating in a blue puddle, and what appears to be the inside of a mouth — teeth and a tongue — inside a woman’s anus.

“Some people from the south have troubles with the graphic nature of some Inuit stories. But I love this drawing,” Ritchie said.

Beyond the racy picture, a hallway opens up into a drawing studio where two of Nunavut’s most successful artists work on their latest creations: Tim Pitsiulak and Shuvenai Ashoona.

And beyond the drawing studio is storage space that houses prints of every collection since the inaugural collection in 1959.

Beside boarded-up bookshelves containing books on art from around the circumpolar world and across the decades, Ritchie pointed to a blueprint of the new studio space under construction — first slated to open in 2016 but will now be ready for 2018.

The new studio won’t be much larger than the existing studio, Ritchie said.

“The thing is, all the artists will be together: the stone-cutters, the lithography, the drawing space will all be in one line, so everyone will be able to interact with each other. Right now, there’s a bit of us versus them going on across the street.”

And sooner or later, Ritchie said he’d like to retire.

“We need to find a new me. I’d like to work with someone for three years or so, and then let the new person take over. We all need succession.”

A drawing by Ningeokulu Teevee inspired by the legend of Kiviuq. (PHOTO BY THOMAS ROHNER)