Faces

Lucy Tasseor Tutsweetok was an Inuk sculptor born in Nunalla, Manitoba, a member of the Ihalmiut people who lived near Ennadai Lake. After her father's death, she went to live with her grandparents and moved between various communities including Churchill and surrounding areas. Her grandfather, Isumatarjuaq, worked for trading posts hauling supplies by dog team or canoe, and Lucy often accompanied him on these trips. He became one of the greatest influences on her life and artistic work, particularly through his storytelling tradition of illustrating tales by drawing shapes in sand with stones placed along the edges.

Tutsweetok began carving stone and occasionally caribou antler in the early 1960s after her marriage and move to Arviat, Nunavut. She worked primarily with the local grey steatite, an extremely hard stone that required her to use basic tools like axes to chip away material. Her sculptures ranged dramatically in size from thumb-length pieces to larger boulder works, and she often left large portions of the material uncarved and unpolished, emphasizing the stone's natural form. She occasionally added incised drawings to her sculptures and turned art production into a family affair, with her husband, three children, and grandchildren frequently assisting with filing and polishing.

Working in a semi-abstract style, Tutsweetok preferred carving family or maternal groups, with themes of mother and child, family, and community becoming the primary focus of her work. The subtle but definitive faces and limbs in her sculptures followed the edges of the rock, folding human form into the pre-existing contours of the stone. Her distinctive approach featured multiple heads or faces defined by flat planes and simple incised lines, seemingly small against the horizon of the single, solid stone mass from which they were carved. This style was directly influenced by childhood memories of her grandfather's storytelling method.

Tutsweetok's work achieved significant recognition through major exhibitions including "Sculpture/Inuit: Masterworks of the Canadian Arctic" (1971-73), "In the Shadow of the Sun: Contemporary Indian and Inuit Art in Canada" (1988), and "Indigena: Contemporary Native Perspectives in Canadian Art" (1992) at the Canadian Museum of Civilization. In 1991, she was commissioned by the Earth Spirit Festival to carve a piece for the "Visions of Power" exhibition, and that same year spent two weeks at the Canadian Museum of Civilization creating works for the "Indigena" exhibition. Her first solo exhibition was held at the Art Gallery of Ontario in 2011, and her work is held in collections including the National Gallery of Canada, the Winnipeg Art Gallery, and UBC's Museum of Anthropology. Through her sculptures, she sought to preserve what she called "the old way of life" and document the changes she observed in her community for future generations.