Lucy Tasseor Tutsweetok, Untitled (group of figures), c. 1970 - 1985. Soapstone. Gift of Mandel and Carol Sprachman, 2006.
Lucy Tasseor Tutsweetok
EXHIBITION OVERVIEW
Lucy Tasseor Tutsweetok
1934–2012
The Art Gallery of Ontario mourns the loss of artist and friend Lucy Tasseor Tutsweetok, who passed away in early April 2012, in Arviat, Nunavut. She was an artist with a truly distinctive voice, and she will be greatly missed.
Lucy Tasseor is from Arviat, the southernmost community on the Nunavut mainland, close to the geographical centre of Canada. The local stone, a tough grey steatite, is harder than the steel tools traditionally used by Arviat carvers. In the 1960s, Tasseor began creating a unique style of sculpture, simply by using an axe to chip away the hard stone. As Inuit Art expert Ingo Hessel explains: “[Arviat sculptors] communicate essential ideas of form and content with a minimum of elaboration.” Tasseor’s work is recognizable by its flat planes, with a distinct and simple use of incised line.
This exhibition features over 40 works by Tasseor from the 1960s to the 1990s, all from the AGO’s collection. In keeping with the Gallery’s efforts to provide the public with new ways of seeing art, we asked Toronto artist and Inuit Art collector Ed Pien to envision the exhibition. He created display cases that echo the shape of the kayak, with shard-like forms on which the sculptures rest.