Padloo Samayualie, Inuit Artist – Cape Dorset
Padloo Samayualie comes from a family of well-known artists. Her grandparents on her mother’s side are renowned sculptors Qababuwa and Taraya Tunnillie and on her father’s side Keeleemeeoomie Samayualie was a grandmother and Elijakota Samayualie was an aunt.
Pudloo Samayualie is a multi-disciplinary artist from Kinngait (Cape Dorset), NU who is best known for her illustrations and technical virtuosity. Samayualie began drawing in high school, encouraged by her father. Samayualie’s experimentation with different media, from animation to jewelry are a testament to her creativity. Samayualie’s graphic work engages a mixture of traditional and contemporary subject matter, having focused more on the latter in recent years. Her work explores architectural features, with depictions of Kinngait as well as places she has traveled.
Drawing from contemporary life in the North, Samayualie’s drawings range from landscape to commercial packaging and products. Samayualie often employs a frame to her architectural and landscape drawings beyond the borders of the page, her work is clearly defined as a window into the world through her eyes..
Samayualie’s drawings flatten visual space, with a strong design aesthetic that is punctuated by her use of vibrant colour. Pipes in New York (2016) demonstrates a preoccupation with line and pattern and the built environment, the joints in red add a vibrancy to the drawing. Visually flat with Samayualie’s signature border, the pipes are taken from their context and occupy a space removed from their intended function. They traverse a flat wall as they do the flat page, running in parallel or perpendicular lines. Samayualie’s deliberate framing imparts her chosen design with a graphic, rather than narrative quality.
During her artist residency at the Brooklyn Museum in New York in 2016 she drew many objects within the museum, her technical drawings showing her interpretations moving beyond idle sketches. Samayualie’s choice of subject imparts her humour and agency as an artist in interpreting museum objects and activating them on the page.
Samayualie’s first solo exhibition was at Feheley Fine Arts, Toronto, ON “Padloo Samayualie: North & South” (2017) displayed a range of drawings by the artist from her landscapes to object-based design work. The exhibition pronounced her distinct hand and her subject matter, the infrastructural elements between Northern and Southern communities interpreted in pencil and ink. Samayualie’s work is held in public collections internationally including the Winnipeg Art Gallery and the Richard F. Brush Museum, Canton, NY, U.S. Her print Amiarutit (Brushes) was chosen for the Cape Dorset Annual Print Collection in 2012 – From Inuit Art Foundation
