Born in 1927 in Ikerrasak, Northwest Territories, at the southern tip of Baffin Island, Kenojuak began to draw in her early 20s while recovering from tuberculosis.
Though best known for her representations of birds, Kenojuak’s themes also included rabbits, dogs, whales and a host of other animals, as well as humans, spirits, the sun, transformed creatures and objects representative of her culture and environment. Her goal, she stated simply, was to “make something beautiful.”
Recognition began as early as 1962 when she was the subject of a National Film Board documentary. In 1990, Indian and Northern Affairs Canada commissioned Kenojuak’s print Nunavut Qajanatuk to commemorate the signing of the Inuit Land Claim Agreement in Principle. Kenojuak later created the spectacular, hand-coloured lithograph Nunavut to mark the signing of the Final Agreement. She was made Officer of the Order of Canada in 1967, with a promotion to Companion of the Order of Canada in 1982, and held honorary degrees from Queen’s University in Kingston and the University of Toronto.
As Kenojuak explained in 1980 to Jean Blodgett, author of several books and essays on the artist: “I just take these things out of my thoughts and out of my imagination, and I don’t give any weight to the idea of its being an image of something… I am just concentrating on placing it down on paper in a way that is pleasing to my eye, whether it has anything to do with subjective reality or not. And that is how I have always tried to make my images, and that is still how I do it, and I haven’t thought about it any other way than that. That is just my style and is the way I started and the way I am today
