Artist Biography
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One time a group of singers came to the community. My daughter was watching me while I was carving. She asked me if carving a sculpture was the same a singing. I replied, “Yes, it is.” - Lucy Tasseor (interview with Ingo Hessel, 1989)

Lucy Tasseor was born in 1934 at Nunalla in northern Manitoba, just south of the border with the then Northwest Territories (now Nunavut). She is a member of the Ihalmiut, a sub-group of the Caribou Inuit whose territories centred on the area in and around Ennadai Lake further north. When famine struck this region in the late 1950s, Tasseor initially went to Rankin Inlet, where she met and married Richard Tutsweetok. The couple later settled in the coastal community of Arviat, joining other displaced members of her group. In the mid 1960s, Tasseor began making stone sculptures. This marked the beginning of a prolific career lasting more than four decades. In 1992, she was one of two Inuit artists featured in Indigena: Contemporary Native Perspectives in Canadian Art, a landmark exhibition organized by the Canadian Museum of Civilization. One of the foremost artists of her generation, Tasseor stopped carving a few years ago in response to a series of health issues. Lucy passed away in Arviat in early Spring, 2012.

The majority of Tasseor’s sculptures portray domestic subjects: mothers and children or, even more characteristically, familial groups represented through clusters of faces. Like her friend and contemporary John Pangnark, she has always preferred to let her material speak fully and freely, often incorporating the stone’s natural shape directly into the image. Tasseor’s minimalist sculptures from the late 1960s and early 1970s are known for the play of unpolished stone and volumetric mass. These sculptures often show faces on the top edges and sides, as though pulled out of the stone through its own internal forces. In some works, Tasseor uses a sgraffito technique to add motifs such as igloos or animals to the stone’s surface. Her work from the 1980s and 1990s tended to be even more simplified in form, and is characterized by a new directness in expression.