Alootook Ipellie

Today we begin the first in a series of blog posts on Inuit artist and writer Alootook Ipellie, whose work is featured in the touring exhibition Walking Both Sides of an Invisible Border which was on view at Gallery 1C03 from February 27 - March 13, 2020. This exhibition has been produced by Carleton University Art Gallery and curated by Sandra Dyck, Heather Igloliorte and Christine Lalonde. It is the first retrospective of this remarkable artist and it draws from the many facets of his exceptional career.

So, who was Alootook Ipellie?

Alootook Ipellie (1951–2007) was born at Nuvuqquq on Baffin Island and raised in Iqaluit. He moved to Ottawa in the late 1960s to attend high school and spent most of his adult life there, working as an artist, writer, cartoonist, editor, illustrator and journalist.

The exhibition’s title refers to Ipellie’s poem of the same name, published in An Anthology of Canadian Literature in English (2^nd edition, 1998) and available to read on the website Poetry in Voice.

Indeed, Ipellie’s diverse and prodigious body of work is defined, at its heart, by his lifelong struggle to reconcile the two worlds in which he lived. As he writes in his poem, “I did not ask to be born an Inuk, nor did I ask to be forced to learn an alien culture with an alien language.” Everyday survival on this border, he said, sometimes required “fancy dancing.”

Alootook Ipellie once joked that he had a “Ph.D. in Silentology,” but his work was not quiet, nor was it created at an emotional remove. He identified his “tools of operation” as “the power of the written word and the spilling of India ink on illustration board.” His job, he said, was to “interpret the imagination.”

With great wit, passion and sensitivity, Ipellie gave voice to significant issues affecting Inuit Nunangat. His work feels prescient because it addresses topics that are still urgent, such as political sovereignty, climate change, resource extraction and the ongoing impact of colonization.

Alootook Ipellie’s work was disseminated widely in magazines like Inuit Monthly, Inuit Today and Nunatsiaq News, and in books including Paper Stays Put (1980) and the extraordinary Arctic Dreams and Nightmares (1993). But he never found a place in the “so-called Inuit Art World,” as he described it, working outside the co-op system and without the benefit of an art dealer. He nonetheless considered himself fortunate to spend his days writing and drawing. As Ipellie said, “We humans have to wonder how the world may have turned out if it weren’t blessed with the creativity of its artists.”

Source:
Sandra Dyck, Heather Igloliorte and Christine Lalonde, Walking Both Sides of an Invisible Border, exhibition introduction panel, 2018.

Photo of Alootook Ipellie by John MacDonald.