Kuujjuaq sculptor turns ice into art at Quebec’s Winter Carnival

Sammy Kudluk’s ice sculpture depicting two Inuit women holding a qulliq was viewed by thousands of people at the Quebec Winter Carnival.

The Kuujjuaq artist created the piece Feb. 11.

Kudluk said he has been honing his craft as an artist for nearly 50 years, doing painting, sculpting and soapstone carving.

“I have not done that much ice sculpting,” Kudluk said in a phone interview, after returning from Quebec City.

Kuujjuaq’s river ice, he explained, has too much air in it and tends to crack, but the ice at the carnival is made specifically for the art.

Kudluk’s first foray into ice-sculpting was five years ago, at the ice hotel created each year in Sainte-Foy near Quebec City.

For this festival, Kudluk said his only preparation was to pack up his tools and come up with a faint idea of what he was going to do.

Sammy Kudluk’s ice sculpture was finished on the final day of the Quebec Winter Carnival last Sunday. (Photo courtesy of Nunavik Tourism/Isabelle Dubois)

“I don’t usually know exactly what I am going to do until I see the material they are providing,” he said.

At the winter carnival, Kudluk had a spot at the Indigenous Tourism Quebec zone which represented all of the province’s 11 Indigenous nations.

When he was given 10 blocks of ice to work with, he said he wondered: “What can I do with this that will represent Inuit culture?”

His sculpture of the women took three days to create, and carried with it multiple challenges.

For starters, the average temperature was around 5 C that weekend.

“It was raining on Saturday morning, then it drizzled in the afternoon,” he said. “By the last day, my statue was dripping and it was getting hard to sculpt.”

There were many spectators at the carnival. Visitors would watch him sculpt and ask questions.

He said hundreds of children from a peewee hockey tournament held during the carnival also came by Kudluk’s statue, and some dared to touch it.

The whole experience was eye-opening for Kudluk — for a while, he had stopped creating art altogether.

“Before COVID, I did art workshop co-ordination, helping artists all over the place,” he said. “But I kind of burned out from art.”

But last year, he said his urge to create art came back. But this time he wants to focus on himself.

Kudluk currently runs a soapstone carving shop in Kuujjuaq and intends to compete in local art competitions.

He may have stopped teaching, but he said he still wants to pass down his knowledge to his 15-year-old granddaughter, who looks up to him as an artist.

“I am going to keep doing this for as long as I can,” Kudluk said.