Jutai Toonoo was born in 1959 at a small camp on Baffin Island in what is now the Inuit-governed territory of Nunavut. A resident of the community of Cape Dorset since childhood, Toonoo began making stone sculptures at a very young age, learning to carve from his artist father. After working for a time as an office worker, an occupation he found creatively unfulfilling, he returned to art-making full time in the late 1990s.

Toonoo is best known for his unconventional images of human heads and figures, many of which are portrayed in restless sleep- or dream-like states. Carved mostly from locally quarried green and black serpentinite, Toonoo's sculptures range in stature from a few inches to several feet and are rendered in a style that is both minimal and eerily expressionistic.

An artist with an unusual and sometimes stark, even unsettling vision, the bilingual Inuk gives most of his sculptures titles in English. In a gesture that is as contemporary as it is traditional, the artist often boldly inscribes additional text directly onto the stone's surface; by turns witty and thoughtful, these messages are themselves significant acts of communication as revealing and expressive as the images they gloss.

Toonoo's work is found in many private and public collections in Canada and abroad. Life Forms, his first solo exhibition, was held at Marion Scott Gallery from August 13 through September 25, 2005.