Artist’s work appears larger than life in Ottawa

Gayle Uyagaqi Kabloona stands below the reproduction of her Sedna wall hanging installed on a parking garage on York Street in the ByWard Market as part of Ottawa’s Arts Corridor public art route. (Photo courtesy of Gayle Uyagaqi Kabloona)

The work of an Inuk artist based in Ottawa has reached a scale she has never before experienced: towering several storeys above a street as part of a new downtown art display.

“I think this is one of the first times that my artwork has been bigger than me,” Gayle Uyagaqi Kabloona said of the reproduction of her embroidered image of Sedna, which hangs from a York Street parking garage in Ottawa’s ByWard Market.

The piece is part of the city’s Arts Corridor, a public art route launched in June that connects the Ottawa Art Gallery, the National Arts Centre and the National Gallery of Canada. 

The original embroidery is about five feet tall and made of wool duffle, melton wool and embroidery floss. The installation, raised July 9, is a high-resolution photograph of the original work that was enlarged and printed on vinyl.

“There’s a large urban Inuit population and a lot of people who come down from Inuit regions who end up visiting Ottawa,” Kabloona said.

“I think it would be really nice to see if you were just visiting to have some kind of representation in the capital.”

She said she wanted the piece to honour traditional Inuit storytelling while also examining women’s experiences within those stories.

“As I got older, I noticed that a lot of the women in the traditional stories have some kind of violence done to them by the men in society, or their families, or their husbands, or somebody,” Kabloona said. 

“So I wanted to continue the tradition of telling stories, but kind of draw attention to these dynamics between genders that isn’t a healthy way to continue.”

Kabloona said the original work includes embroidered panels that depict the classic version of the story, where Sedna experiences betrayal and violence before transforming into the sea goddess. The panels can be flipped to reveal Sedna alone at in the centre to depict her as independent and able to choose her own path.

Its creation is documented in the short film Nivingajuliat, which means “wall hanging” in Inuktitut and was directed by filmmakers Tess Gerard and Shelby Lisk. It premièred on June 4 at the imagineNATIVE Film and Media Arts Festival in Toronto.

Kabloona began the artwork in 2024 during a residency at the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity. Wall hangings became an important art form in Baker Lake as the wage economy was introduced, she said, with many women using the medium to support their families.

Her grandmother, Victoria Mamnguqsualuk, and great-grandmother, Jessie Oonark, helped establish the tradition, she said.

“It feels great to be working in the same medium as my grandmother and to be able to honour how she made her living and the impact that she made on Inuit art,” Kabloona said.

The documentary is also scheduled to screen at the Asinabka Festival in Ottawa in September.