Shuvinai Ashoona is a Kinngait (Cape Dorset), Nunavut based artist who works predominantly in drawing. Her preferred media are pen and ink, coloured pencils and graphite. Her earliest works date to the early 1990s, when she first began working with Kinngait Studios, with her first major exhibition Three Women, Three Generations: Drawings by Pitseolak Ashoona, Napatchie Pootoogook and Shuvinai Ashoona appearing at the McMichael Canadian Art Collection in Kleinburg, Ontario in 1999. The daughter of carver Kiugak Ashoona and the granddaughter of legendary graphic artist Pitseolak Ashoona, Ashoona grew up surrounded by the artistic legacy of her family as well as inspiration from the land, living largely in outpost camps before settling permanently in Kinngait (Cape Dorset) in her late 20s.

S. Ashoona’s work is unique for the way that she portrays aspects of everyday life, as well as fantastical compositions from her own imagination or based on stories and memories. She is known for her highly detail-oriented approach to the page, with meticulously crafted landscapes that often include the rocky shorelines and horizons of her home in Nunavut. She frequently includes elements of the fantastical in these compositions, such as Creatures (2015) where an assemblage of odd characters gather together on the land. The image focuses on a woman with green skin and long tentacle legs wearing an amauti (woman’s parka) with an otherworldly baby peeking out from the hood. The land is unmistakably the rocky terrain of Nunavut, but the host of creatures accompanying this young mother seem to have been beamed in from another planet.

She has also been known to experiment with three dimensional compositions drawn onto the sides of paper cubes or pyramids, such as her work Composition (Cube) (2009). The hills and streams of Kinngait are visible on five sides of the cube, with homes and qamutiit (sleds) populating the bottom edges. It is an idyllic scene of daily life in the community, perhaps in the spring or summer, and one that invites the viewer to walk around the piece and take in multiple angles and vignettes.

S. Ashoona’s place as an iconic Inuk artist has now been well-established in the Inuit arts landscape and she has continued to produce extraordinary solo works as well as significant collaborations. In 2022, Tanya Tagaq’s film “Ever Deadly” premiered at Toronto International Film Festival, featuring animations that were conceived by the artist. S. Ashoona’s career has proven to have massive national and international appeal, with other notable exhibitions at the Art Basel in 2008, the Biennale of Sydney Biennale in 2012 and the Venice Biennale in 2022. She is the subject of the 2010 documentary Ghost Noise.