page_title: Shuvinai Ashoona
section_title: Artistic career
hierarchical_section_title: Shuvinai Ashoona / Artistic career
caption_attribution_description: English: 'Shoveling Worlds' by Shuvinai Ashoona was purchased by the Art Gallery of Ontario in 2013.
context_page_description: Shuvinai Ashoona is an Inuk artist who works primarily in drawing. She is known for her detailed pen and pencil drawings depicting northern landscapes and contemporary Inuit life.
context_section_description: Ashoona's drawings are sometimes rooted in nature, but other times drawn from imagination, creating a claustrophobic, dense effect. Recurring images include the egg shape; the kudlik, a stone oil lamp; and the ulu; historical images or events occasionally appear, like the Nascopie, a supply ship which brought goods and people to Cape Dorset until its sinking in 1947. Setting Ashoona's work apart from the Inuit artists before her is a reflection of the blending of modern and traditional life in Nunavut.
  Her first drawings in the Kinngait Studios archives — the internationally renowned printmaking studio founded by the West Baffin Eskimo Cooperative in 1959 — date from around 1993. Her early works were small, detailed, monochromatic landscape drawings, often depicting rocky, sparsely populated terrains from aerial perspectives. Ashoona's monochromes are densely rendered, stunningly intricate compositions in ink and black fineliner. These landscapes were partly realistic in depicting detailed topography around Cape Dorset (Kinngait) and partly fantasy, for example, elements such as stairs that emerge as land formations yet lead nowhere. In sharp contrast to the work of other Cape Dorset artists, these landscape views were largely devoid of human activity and were also unusual in their introspective quality, seemingly to mirror an interior world while illustrating an exterior one. Because of her painstaking drawing process, it took several years to develop a body of work substantial enough for exhibition. Although two small etchings were included in the 1997 annual Cape Dorset print collection, her first major exhibition was Three Women, Three Generations: Drawings by Pitseolak Ashoona, Napatchie Pootoogook and Shuvinai Ashoona at the McMichael Canadian Art Collection in Kleinburg, Ontario. One of six works from this period acquired by the National Gallery of Canada, Rock Landscape was also featured in the CBC radio series All in a Day (One Treasure at a Time) in 2003.
  She began using colour in her drawings in the early 2000s, portraying human figures, their shelters, and tools within graphic, imposing topographies, like in the work Composition (Sewage Truck) (2007-8) in the Samuel and Esther Sarick Collection of the Art Gallery of Ontario.  Throughout her career the internal cosmology of her works has become more pronounced, with eggs, card suits, globes, and snatches of text surfacing over and over. Her collaborative work (with John Noestheden), Earth and Sky is a gigantic banner that debuted at Art Basel in 2009 in an installation complex called Stadthimmel ("Citysky"). It was also exhibited at the 2012 Biennale of Sydney "All Our Relations,"  and at the Justina M. Barnicke Gallery at the University of Toronto, paired with the Toronto-based artist Shary Boyle.  Boyle and Ashoona went on to collaborate on the 2015 travelling exhibition Universal Cobra, building collaborative fantasy worlds, sharing space on the paper.
  In roughly 2009 Ashoona began working with a motif of worlds, drawing human, animal, and hybrid figures interacting with blue and green planets within fantastical settings, as exhibited in Shuvinai's World(s) at Feheley Fine Arts in Toronto, September 2012. She has exhibited frequently with Feheley Fine Arts and Marion Scott Gallery in Vancouver.
  Mapping Worlds, a survey of work by Shuvinai Ashoona, was organized and presented by The Power Plant gallery (Toronto) in 2019. Described as her first major solo museum exhibition, Mapping Worlds continues to circulate in 2020, including at the Leonard and Bina Ellen Art Gallery at Concordia University (Montréal) and at the Vancouver Art Gallery. Beyond Canada, Holding on to Universes, an exhibition of her lesser known work is being presented in 2020 at the Glasgow Centre for Contemporary Arts in Scotland.
  Ashoona is the subject of a short documentary film titled Ghost Noise (2010), directed by Marcia Connolly and had the song "Midnight Sun" dedicated to her by musician Kevin Hearn, who she painted a guitar for.
  Shuvinai Ashoona was awarded the 2018 Gershon Iskowitz 
caption: Shoveling Worlds acquired by the Art Gallery of Ontario in 2013[10]
exif: {"Image Make": "Canon", "Image Model": "Canon EOS REBEL T3i", "Image Orientation": "Horizontal (normal)", "Image XResolution": "72", "Image YResolution": "72", "Image ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Image Software": "Adobe Photoshop CS2 Windows", "Image DateTime": "2013:10:05 17:09:49", "Image YCbCrPositioning": "Co-sited", "Image ExifOffset": "224", "Thumbnail Compression": "JPEG (old-style)", "Thumbnail XResolution": "72", "Thumbnail YResolution": "72", "Thumbnail ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormat": "1330", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormatLength": "9796", "EXIF ExposureTime": "1/60", "EXIF FNumber": "4", "EXIF ExposureProgram": "Program Normal", "EXIF ISOSpeedRatings": "400", "EXIF SensitivityType": "Recommended Exposure Index", "EXIF RecommendedExposureIndex": "400", "EXIF ExifVersion": "0230", "EXIF DateTimeOriginal": "2013:05:29 04:14:57", "EXIF DateTimeDigitized": "2013:05:29 04:14:57", "EXIF ComponentsConfiguration": "YCbCr", "EXIF ShutterSpeedValue": "6", "EXIF ApertureValue": "4", "EXIF ExposureBiasValue": "0", "EXIF MeteringMode": "Pattern", "EXIF Flash": "Flash fired, compulsory flash mode", "EXIF FocalLength": "27", "EXIF SubSecTime": "17", "EXIF SubSecTimeOriginal": "17", "EXIF SubSecTimeDigitized": "17", "EXIF FlashPixVersion": "0100", "EXIF ColorSpace": "sRGB", "EXIF ExifImageWidth": "432", "EXIF ExifImageLength": "429", "Interoperability InteroperabilityIndex": "R98", "Interoperability InteroperabilityVersion": "[48, 49, 48, 48]", "EXIF InteroperabilityOffset": "1204", "EXIF FocalPlaneXResolution": "691200/181", "EXIF FocalPlaneYResolution": "460800/119", "EXIF FocalPlaneResolutionUnit": "2", "EXIF CustomRendered": "Normal", "EXIF ExposureMode": "Auto Exposure", "EXIF WhiteBalance": "Auto", "EXIF SceneCaptureType": "Standard", "EXIF CameraOwnerName": "", "EXIF BodySerialNumber": "152166156199", "EXIF LensSpecification": "[18, 55, 0/0, 0/0]", "EXIF LensModel": "EF-S18-55mm f/3.5-5.6 IS II", "EXIF LensSerialNumber": "00000cdd76"}