Born around 1906 near the Back River, Jessie Oonark belonged to the Utkusiksalingmiut (“people of the soapstone pots”). In 1918 she went to live at the camp of her future husband, Kabloonak, with whom she would have many children. After an unknown illness claimed the life of Kabloonak in 1954, Oonark turned to relatives and her older children for help and support. In 1958 Oonark and members of her family left the Back River area to take up permanent residence at Baker Lake to the south. Once in Baker Lake she began making drawings, quickly attracting the attention of the Cape Dorset print studio, which took the unusual step of including two of the Baker Lake artist’s images in its 1960 print collection. Already a proficient seamstress, Oonark also began making small wallhangings using scraps of imported fabrics. By 1970 she was making large appliquéd and embroidered works in the hieratic style for which she became famous, and in 1973 she was commissioned to create one of the largest wallhangings ever for the National Arts Centre in Ottawa. She continued to draw, contributing many strong images to Baker Lake’s print collections of the 1970s and early 80s. By the mid-1970s several of Oonark’s children had also emerged as artists of distinction, including Janet Kigusiuq, Victoria Mamnguqsualak, Miriam Qiyuk and the stone carver Josiah Nuilaalik. She died in 1985 in Churchill, Manitoba. Two years after her death Oonark’s work was featured in a major retrospective at the Winnipeg Art Gallery.

Oonark is widely considered to be one of the greatest designers in the history of northern art. While her wallhangings are often much larger in scale and compositionally more complex than either her drawings or prints, both her works on paper and her fabric works bear the hallmarks of her distinctive style. Her designs are generally bold, often highly formalized and frequently symmetrical. Some images verge towards geometrical abstraction, while others combine abstract elements with a semi-representational approach. Repetition and alternating bands of colour give to many works an appealing semi-decorative element. At once powerful and refined, even delicate, many of Oonark’s best images consist of forms divided into solid areas of contrasting colours, and feature emphatic lines (either straight of slightly curved) and elongated shapes. Circular motifs are common as well. Subjects range from multitudes of animals and people arranged in structured patterns and often joined together in sequences, to single portraits of women and men shown in profile or head on. Many images feature stylized representations of the ulu, or woman’s knife; shamans and spirits also appear as themes, as do more contemporary motifs including snowmobiles and planes.

Selected References

Jessie Oonark: A Retrospective (1987), Jean Blodgett and Marie Bouchard
Vision and Form (2003), Robert Kardosh