THOMAS UGJUK (1921-D) KANGIQLINIQ (RANKIN INLET)
Family Moving Camp, early 1970s
stone, 12 x 20.5 x 9.5 in (30.5 x 52.1 x 24.1 cm)
signed "UGJUK".

ESTIMATE: $8,000 — $12,000

Provenance
Collection of John and Joyce Price, Seattle.

Thomas Ugjuk, the son of the renowned Rankin Inlet artist John Kavik, lived for decades in the region between Baker Lake and Cambridge Bay, before settling in Rankin Inlet in 1958 to work at the nickel mine, which closed in 1962. Ugjuk never became a full-time artist like his father but carved enough to help feed his family and buy hunting supplies, supplying his father with stone from the mine in the early years; he continued hunting well into his seventies. The elderly Kavik lived with Udjuk until shortly before his death in 1993. Family Moving Camp is one of Ugjuk’s larger works, probably carved in the same period as his Life on the Land (First Arts, 1 Dec. 2020, Lot 89).

The influence of Kavik’s raw carving style as well as John Tiktak’s later multiple face works is apparent in Ugjuk’s sculptures. However, Ugjuk’s sculptures tend to be both more realistic in style and more narrative in content. Carved in Udjuk’s signature blocky style, Family Moving Camp movingly captures the hard reality of Udjuk’s early traditional life inland, which involved much travelling with dogs in a constant search for game. “When I first arrived to live near the sea [in Rankin Inlet in 1958], I didn’t have any idea that the sea could be a place for hunting… When I first started living down on the seashore, I was absolutely ignorant as to how to hunt from the sea.” [1] The heaviness of this massive, rugged sculpture is lightened by the charmingly excited faces if the small family as they catch sight of game, or a familiar campsite, or possibly even friends and family. The boy at the front of the group is undoubtedly the young Udjuk himself.

1. See “John Kavik’s Son, Thomas Ugjuk, Speaks about his Father and Himself” in Inuit Art Quarterly (Vol. 8 No. 4, Winter 1993:26-30), p. 30.