Description
Gorgeous print from the 2026 Dorset Print Collection: Dinosaur Riding Transformation by Pitseolak Qimirpiq.
“Pitsiulaq (Pitseolak) Qimirpik is a young Cape Dorset carver who’s quickly established himself as both apprentice (his father is renowned Dorset carver Kelly Qimirpik) and contemporary artist. Indeed, Qimirpik has successfully distinguished himself through this very juxtaposition, marrying pop-culture signifiers with traditional carving. He sits at the helm of a surging generation of Inuit artists who are reconfiguring their position onto history, traditional media, and narrative figuration. It’s a group who’s establishing itself through an aesthetic more easily situated in the contemporary artworld, while never fully divorced from its ancestral associations and formal base.
Qimirpik, like so many of his contemporaries, continues to make the link between the two.” – TD Bank
“I wanted to do something fun.”
That’s what Pitseolak Qimirpik tells me when I ask about his shift from sculpture to drawing, and those words are certainly apt for an artist who seems to have devoted much of his career to lively and often funny work.
Qimirpik’s stone sculptures have often been noted for a palpable sense of joy—whether they feature dancing bears and walruses or pop culture icons like Nintendo’s Mario, Marge and Homer Simpson, or a young man dancing with an iPod. The artist from Kinngait, NU, has been working with stone since he was just thirteen, but in 2021 he began to create vibrant coloured pencil drawings that pop off the page, bursting with eclectic figures and forms.
The transition from sculpture to drawing is more linear than one might think. “I drew a lot in school,” Qimirpik says, emphasizing that although his public-facing work has been sculptural for decades, drawing has always been part of his planning process. He calls the transition from two-dimensional sketches to three-dimensional pieces a “transformation” he enacts as the sculptor. IAF
