Big-city bound

MIRIAM HILL

RESOLUTION ISLAND – Tell me you’re joking,” the man says as he lifts a box full of soapstone and carries it off the boat on the shore of Resolution Island. He starts to lug it across dangerously uneven ground to a campsite.

“Why would I be carrying soapstone?” the man, part of a Canadian Forces and Navy sovereignty exercise on the island, asks no one in particular.

The box of soapstone is for Kimmirut carver Matto Michael. Michael, a Canadian Ranger, arrived on the island via the Navy ship HMCS Summerside to act as part of a 24-hour polar bear patrol with five other Rangers. He brought a box filled with soapstone in case bad weather forced the Rangers to stay on the island longer than expected.

Michael has a plane ticket to Toronto, for a solo show opening Aug. 8 at the Guild Shop. He was scheduled to carve in the gallery on Aug. 9 and 10.

Michael, the son of acclaimed carvers Eliyah and the late Annie Michael, is used to travelling the world. He’s been to a number of cities in Canada and the United States with his work.

“Carvings are my tickets,” he explains. Carving since the age of 13, he learned from watching his parents and then honed his own style.

Michael sometimes works with ivory and antler, but his medium of choice is soapstone and his subject of choice Arctic animals.

What he carves “really depends on the stone,” he says. “There’s a lot of imagination going into the stone.”

He recalls meeting an Arab man on a trip to Iqaluit some years ago.

“He said, ‘I hear you’re good carver,'” Michael says. The man asked Michael to carve something for him, and Michael left it up to him what the animal would be.

“I thought he’d want a polar bear or walrus, but he asked for a camel,” Michael says. Michael carved the camel from his imagination, and the man was pleased.

Michael opens the cardboard box and unwraps chunks of partially carved soapstone protected by padding. He takes out tools and in his bright red Ranger sweatshirt and ball cap starts to chip away at the stone.

“I won’t have time to do much here [on Resolution Island],” he says. His job on the weekend trip is to keep personnel involved in the exercise free from harm, but he’ll try to complete the works at the Toronto gallery.

A TV sitcom fan, Michael says he was thrilled on one of his trips to visit Cincinnati, the home of a favourite show, WKRP in Cincinnati.

“I wanted to see the WKRP place,” he says. He was disappointed to learn it was a fictional radio station. “But I got to see the fountain they show in the opening.”

Michael’s show will run until Sept. 8.