Janet Kigusiuq was born in 1926 in the Back River/Garry Lake area. The eldest child of Jessie Oonark (1906-1985), she spent the first part of her life learning the lifestyle and survival techniques of the Utkusiksalingmiut. Hunger resulting from poor hunting and fishing, combined with meager trapping, was a common experience for Kigusiuq and her siblings. The situation was made worse when their father, Kabloonak, died of an unknown disease in 1953/54, but by then Kigusiuq had married and was living with her husband, Mark Uqayuittuq (1925-1984). In the early 1960s the couple decided to leave the famine-prone Back River area, following other members of the Utkusiksalingmiut south to Baker Lake. There Kigusiuq, along with some of her sisters, started making drawings at the suggestion of Oonark, who had been making and selling art since her own arrival in the community in the late 1950s. Kigusiuq also began making wallhangings at about the same time, and briefly experimented with sculpture. Throughout the 1970s and 80s a number of her drawn images were translated into prints and included in Baker Lake’s annual collections. After printmaking was suspended in Baker Lake in 1990, Kigusiuq continued to make original works on paper on a fulltime basis, encouraged by strong demand for her work in the South. A widow since 1984, Kigusiuq continued to live and work in Baker Lake, making periodic trips to the South to attend show openings. She passed away February 27, 2005.

Kigusiuq’s earliest works on paper consist of dense compositions of people and animals outlined in graphite pencil, in which colour is generally reserved for the trimmed edges of parkas. While figures within these compositions may overlap one another to indicate spatial depth and distance, Kigusiuq’s use of this parcticular pictorial convention is often highly selective and, together with the absence of a single viewing orientation indicating top and bottom, suggests the influence of non-Western ways of seeing and representing. Kigusiuq’s compositions from the mid-1970s onward tend to be bolder, often dramatically dominated by a smaller number of human figures or half-figures rendered in profile or head on. Unusual aeriel perspectives are also common. Over time colour has also become more important, culminating in the appearance in the 1990s of images rendered entirely as semi-abstract patterns of strong colour, wherein figure and ground are accorded equal expressive value. She has also experimented in recent years with the technique of paper collage.

Kigusiuq’s subjects range from the legends and beliefs of the Utkusiksalingmiut to personal memories of the people and activities she knew and experienced during her Back River/Garry Lake days. Human giants, shamans and large supernatural birds are favourite themes belonging to the first category, while scenes of people fishing, hunting and travelling overland make up the bulk of images belonging to the second. Other works portray rows of drying fish, animals walking, fish turning in water, and birds flying or swimming. Her recent, abstract-like landscapes likewise recall the hills and fishing spots of the Back River/Garry Lake area of her youth, transformed, it would seem, into a “mythical land bathed in the light of paradise,” as one writer put it.

Selected References

Qamanittuaq: Where the River Widens (1994), Judith Nasby, ed.
Second Nature: Recent Works on Paper by Janet Kigusiuq (2002, exhibition brochure), Feheley Fine Arts.