Boy Fishing

“We use our land to provide for us at times. It’s good or hard to us. Sometimes food is plenty, sometimes food is scarce. When people come together, they create work.” Elsie Klengenberg.

Elsie Klengenberg is a graphic artist from Ulukhaktok, Canada. In the early 1980s, she collaborated with Mary Okheena and Mabel Nigiyok to develop a new stencilling technique that transformed printmaking. Translucent mylar (polyester film) overlays gave artists precise control over colour intensity and tonal variation. As a result, these prints have a three-dimensional quality.

This marked a creative turning point in Ulukhaktok’s 40-year printmaking tradition, which had evolved through sealskin stencils, stonecuts, woodcuts, and lithography before returning to stencilling. Works like Boy Fishing reflect the community’s characteristic naturalism and graphic detail.

Visual description: An Inuit boy in a pink parka and dark brown trousers leans over the side of a canoe. His face is hidden by a hood as he thrusts a three-pronged spear with a yellow shaft directly below into the water. Four salmon swim underneath the canoe. One has curled its tail, as if coming to a sudden stop in front of the spear. A fifth salmon floats on the surface, pierced by a second spear.