Simon Tookoome was born in 1934 at Chantrey Inlet. He grew up learning the traditional lifestyle and beliefs of the Utkusiksalingmiut, a mainly inland group of Inuit who occupied the territory along the Back River. He also spent time in Gjoa Haven on King William Island to the north, where he was exposed to the coastal culture of the Netsilik. Like most Utkusiksalingmiut, he moved south to the community of Baker Lake in the late sixties when severe game shortages threatened the people’s survival. Following the arrival there of Jack and Sheila Butler as arts advisors in 1969, Tookoome took up drawing and stone carving on a full-time basis, becoming in time one of Baker Lake’s most prominent artists. As an active founding member of the Sanavik Co-op, he also cut and printed many images, including some based on his own drawings. Between 1971 and 1990 a total of 58 of his images were published as prints and included in Baker Lake’s annual collections. Admired widely for his recognizable and highly expressive style, and sometimes criticized for repetitiousness, Tookoome is a knowledgeable and strong defender of Inuit traditions, both spiritual and material.

Tookoome's two-dimensional works often combine a dynamic expressionist approach with a more
controlled repetitive-decorative one, and usually unite human and animal subjects in the same image. In some works, hooded human profiles are contained within the bodily contours of a single wolf or dog. In others, large human heads sprout striped arm-like extensions that end in the smaller heads of caribou, wolves, musk oxen and other people. While such images may appear to suggest shaman-like transformations, Peter Millard notes that Tookoome's pictures are most often intended as visualizations of people's inner thoughts. In Tookoome's own words, "a face with images of animals on its cheeks means that the person is thinking of that species of animal, sort of like having a vision or a daydream of animals." Repetition, multiplication and instances of a nearly mirror-like symmetry are important elements in most prints and drawings, many of which feature rows of heads, some in pairs facing one another. Figure-ground relationships also play an significant role: in some images the grounds are divided into areas of solid colour, and in others the grounds are rendered as vibrating patterns of colourful light and dark contrasts.

Tookoome’s stone sculptures, while generally less complex than his drawn images, usually resemble the latter in most important respects, and often consist of human faces and/or animal forms stacked like totems. Many sculptures similarly incorporate negative spaces that function not unlike expressive two-dimensional grounds, a striking contrast to the massive volumes that characterize most Baker Lake sculpture.

Selected References

Qamanittuaq: Where the River Widens (1994), Judith Nasby (ed)
Vision and Form (2003), Robert Kardosh