Meet the Artist: Mark Igloliorte

Mark Igloliorte has created art for as long as he can remember. When an art teacher taught his elementary class drawing exercises using the well-known book “Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain,” it stuck with Mark. To him, there was no hierarchy in the classroom that day—the teacher was a learner along with them. It is a teaching technique he uses now as a professor at Emily Carr University of Art & Design. 

“I like the idea that we’re all learners,” he says. “We're always learning.” 

As an interdisciplinary artist of Inuit ancestry, he uses his art to explore language and identity and connect to his Inuit heritage. With works like “Kayak Is Inuktitut for Seal Hunting Boat” and “Seal Skin Neck Pillow,” his current exhibition, Traverse, examines the colonization of objects and language, and the importance of reconnecting to language, tradition, and culture. 

Traverse is on display in our Aurizon Atrium until September 1 as part of Arctic Visions, an artistic extension of our current feature exhibition, Arctic Voices, presented by RBC. 

As part of Traverse, you created 3 paintings that feature digitally altered satellite imagery with Inuktitut phrases. What was the inspiration behind these paintings? 

I was back in Hopedale, Nunatsiavut where my family is from, and one of the things that I found interesting was the amount of Inuktitut I was hearing while out hunting with my uncle and his friend. There were specific words for everything, from the type of hunting being done to all the different animals. My father went to residential school, so I never really heard him speak Inuktitut although that was all he spoke until he was school-aged. I never heard him speak Inuktitut because of the way that the residential school experience affected him. To go from not hearing a part of your ancestry, a part of your culture, to starting to hear it in a context where it’s comfortable was just a really significant experience for me. 

I’m on my own journey of learning Inuktitut and most recently, I've been working on spray painting skateboards with stencils of Inuktitut words. It's been a lot of fun. There’s this word that I came across—Anittâ. It means “above all negations.” I feel like when you're learning something new, there are so many ways that you or someone else can try to negate the process, and to think that there's a word in my language that covers all of that, a word that says above all negations. A word that says you cannot negate it. I just love that. 

One of your pieces in the exhibition, Kayak Is Inuktitut for Seal Hunting Boat, is a large acrylic painting on the historical significance of the kayak for the Inuit. Can you speak to the importance of reclaiming ownership of language and culture through art? 

I got inspired when I was at the Museum of Anthropology at UBC looking at model kayaks. What struck me about them was that many of them had harpoons and avataqs which you need for seal hunting to help you capture and retrieve the seal. I loved seeing kayaks made by people who were closely connected to that pre-colonial way of living, you know, close to nature and interacting with animals. 

I was thinking of a way to get back to that, to decolonize the kayak because now we have these fiberglass kayaks going around in the Vancouver harbour. It's kind of an odd thing when you think about the origin of it. 

The word “kayak” is an Inuktitut word. There are kayaking programs that are happening across the Arctic right now. And the translation of “kayak” is literally seal hunting boat. There are other kinds of boats in Inuit culture, but the seal hunting boat is the kayak. 

I painted it in the style of a meme because I like that memes are blatant facts but they're also a way to make you rethink your position on something. I wanted to state the obvious fact that a kayak is a seal hunting boat and then keep that in people's minds because what are we talking about when we're talking about a kayak? Are we talking about something for exercise, something for recreation? Or are we talking about something that has Inuit origin and Inuit ownership? 

Can you tell me about the Seal Skin Neck Pillow and why you chose seal skin as your material? 

I really appreciate how, as Indigenous people, we have this close relationship with animals. As a kid I went hunting with my dad and I always valued those experiences and that respect for nature and animals. I see using animal fur as a way of being closely connected to nature. I like that idea that Indigenous people are close to animals and kind of participate in an exchange with them. 

One of the big hits to the seal skin industry back in Newfoundland, and especially in Inuit communities across the north, has been an international trade ban—not being able to send seal from Canada to the European Union. I was thinking about the neck pillow as this thing that accompanies travellers and kind of transcends international boundaries. I saw the neck pillow as something that could find its way around these laws and restrictions that detrimentally affect Inuit economies. 

I got really interested in ways of managing diverse ideas about decolonization and indigenization, and for me as an Inuit person, I was thinking about how my ancestors would have gone to sleep among furs. There's this really tender nuzzle that you can make into a neck pillow and I think about that kind of connection, you know, I think about how my ancestors would have slept in pre-colonial times up against the fur. I really appreciate that I could have access to something like that even on an airplane. 

Traverse is an interesting word because it can simply mean to embark on a journey, but it can also signify that the journey is a difficult one. What does Traverse mean to you? 

The translation for one of the paintings that was in the original exhibition is visiting home, and at the time I had just visited my father's home in Hopedale, Nunatsiavut. When I came back here to Vancouver, I was discovering kayaking and thinking about all this movement, traversing from one place to another, traversing in a kayak, and even traversing these big distances, between what I'm doing right now and my ancestry. I was thinking about this word movement, going between different places, different times, different experiences. With art I’m investigating my culture and reflecting it back. Art is the conduit here. It’s movement. It’s kind of like this reciprocal relationship. 

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

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Learn more about the fascinating, changing Arctic through its many voices.

Our current feature exhibition, Arctic Voices presented by RBC, explores the northernmost biome, a region warming faster than any place on Earth. On until September 2021.