Sparkle and shine

MIRIAM HILL

Suzanne Evaloardjuk places a sliver ring on a mandrel and gently taps it with a mallet. “This may stretch it a bit,” she says to a woman waiting to try on the sterling silver piece of jewelry.

She removes the delicate ring and hands it to the woman. “It’s perfect now,” the woman says, and pays Evaloardjuk for the ring.

Evaloardjuk is demonstrating her jewelry-making prowess at the Unikkaarvik Visitor Centre as part of a summer program called Inuit Art Experience.

A graduate of the Arctic College jewelry program, Evaloardjuk has a studio in her home and teaches workshops throughout the year. She is heading to Kuujjuaq in the fall to give a 10-day course.

“It will be a good experience for me to teach more in Inuktitut,” she says. “The evening classes I teach here are all in English and the materials I prepare, the demonstrations I do are in English. But when I have to teach in Northern Quebec, it will be in Inuktitut. So I’ll have to come up with new terms for silver, copper and brass.”

Seated behind a small table, Evaloardjuk is surrounded by a variety of tools, including pliers and hammers, and a large sketchbook. It’s in her sketchbook that she records the designs that will eventually be recreated in metal, as brooches, pendants or hairclips.

The drawing is traced onto thin, transparent transfer paper that is then glued onto a sheet of metal. She uses a coping saw to cut out the design.

“It’s tiny blade, very sharp,” she says. The saw blade fits into the grooves of its wooden handle almost like the wire in a cheese cutter.

“To tighten it you have to press in so it becomes tight, but not so tight,” she says. “You have to decide on the tune. The tension has to be just right. If it’s too loose, I’ll show you what happens.

Evaloardjuk plucks the blade like a guitar string and it emits a low noise.

“It’s very dull,” she says of the sound.

“After you’ve broken many saw blades you’ll learn what is the best tension for you.”

She tightens the blade and plucks it again, this time resulting in a higher-pitched sound.

The piece of metal is then placed on a cutting T, a piece of wood with wedge shapes cut into it. Copper is a relatively soft metal, she explains, as she puts on a pair of magnifying glasses. The glasses are necessary so she can see the score marks she’s made on the copper, she says. She begins to saw slowly and precisely. Eventually a shape emerges.

“There’s a little baby ulu,” she says laughing. She’s going to attach a bead to represent a handle and eventually the ulu will become one of a pair of earrings.

Evaloardjuk reaches over to a table beside her and presents a container filled with a variety of stone beads.

“These ones I got from down South. But you could also collect your own stones from the river,” she says, adding that garnets are available from Cape Dorset. An onlooker asks if it’s a garnet Evaloardjuk is wearing encased in a gold setting on her finger.

“Yes, it is,” she smiles. “It goes well with gold.”

Evaloardjuk also has some amethyst and pink granite pendants on display.

“That’s abalone shell,” she says, pointing to a flat pendant made of dark multi-coloured material. “It’s a man with head and legs. Abalone shells are illegal to get. The only people who can harvest them are native people in British Columbia, so we do a trade. I give them soapstone and get a handful of abalone.”

Evaloardjuk explains that many of her tools are handmade, and points to chasing tools she has made from nails and pieces of metal. They are used to make designs and dents in the material she’s working with.

“The steel in the nails is solid,” she says, adding she enjoys looking for antique tools to customize her work.

“Part of it is learning as you go what kinds of things you’ll need in your house,” she says. “You go to a scrap metal heap and go, ‘Oh God, garbage metal! Oh yes, I could make something out of this — it could be part of an ulu handle or part of a knife handle.’ After a while, you’re not scared to handle metal anymore because you know how to work with it.”