This text responds to the sculpture ‘Faces’ by Inuit carver Luke Anowtalik which is currently on display at Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge, as part of the House Guests exhibition.
Between April and September the sun never sets in the Arctic Circle. Day after day, hour after hour, the landscape is bleached by sunlight. Slightly south of the Arctic Circle, the sun dips briefly below the horizon, creating two short hours of twilight, but in Arviat, where this sculpture was made, there is no variation. From October, the hours of daylight shorten dramatically, and by December the area receives only five short hours of light. Then comes the darkness: for the next few months, the sun doesn’t rise at all. While it is not quite the land of the midnight sun, there is a particular quality of light in Cambridgeshire, and in the fens especially, that is remarkable. Large empty skies and great flat expanses create a light that has a sheerness to it and a strange stark clarity, especially in the last months of winter and early spring.
Somehow less a sculpture than a multi-faceted drawing in low-relief, ‘Faces’ sees Luke Anowtalik use light and shadow as though they were materials from which to carve. Anowtalik has cut into and shaped the stone in a variety of ways so that the soft steatite is not uniform but subtly and variously coloured and textured: in the deep troughs next to the faces’ hoods and noses are gathered dark grey shadows; the smaller faces, the size of thumb-prints, that curve around the sculpture’s narrow top, are a more polished grey-black; the smooth oval faces of the larger figures are a lighter grey-green; the hatched lines and other rough marks on the body of the stone are a soft beige, and a shallow off-white incision marks each of the eyes. In Inuktitut there are many words for whiteness: PukiK is the white belly of a seal, AluKasijannik the white ice along the shoreline just before a freeze, Taluk the white screen used as camouflage in seal-hunting, and Kutitsak the white of the eye. ‘Faces’, unlike other examples of contemporary Inuit carving, is unpolished. Light does not bounce or slide off it but gets lost in its surfaces; this is a sculpture that catches light, keeps it, and uses it for its own purpose.
In the cottages at Kettle’s Yard daylight enters each room in a way that feels no less considered than the careful arrangement of Jim Ede’s collection. A narrow pane of glass in the downstairs bathroom bathes the room in a curiously stark but diffuse light, while the light that enters the downstairs bedroom does so through blinds that cause it to fall in stripes across a circular wooden table that bears a tiny, angular, bronze sculpture and an arrangement of round pebbles. In the recess in which it now sits, ‘Faces’ is illuminated by light from a North facing window. Its solid shape lists slightly to the left, away from the window, and into the room. To its right, in the opposite corner of the recess, a large round stone casts an elliptical shadow on the stark white wall.