Susie Seeta Saila

Courtesy the artist

Biography

Susie Seeta Saila is an artist from Kinngait (Cape Dorset), NU, who is a quickly rising talent in the world of graphic art. Saila began creating her art—which consists of vibrant and saturated drawings—in 2018 and has been making a name for herself ever since.

Saila enjoys depicting landscapes in her drawings, including mountains and seascapes, translating the world around her onto the page. Drawings such as Untitled (Landscape) (2020) and Landscape (Pink) (2020) illustrate Saila’s innate ability to use colour to create depth and movement. Saila’s pattern-rich drawings simply pop off the page through of her choice of vibrant colours that are both eye-catching and contrasting. Her signature approach to depicting sea ice, with spears of sky blue piercing into expanses of white, led to Landscape (Pink) being chosen as the cover art for the Inuit Art Quarterly’s Winter 2021 issue, Freeze Up. When told that her art had been chosen to be on the cover, Saila says, “I was so surprised.”1 Aside from drawing the world around her, Saila’s favourite thing to draw is local wildlife such as owls.

Saila has previously participated in Embassy of the Imagination workshops including a self-portraiture project that eventually made its way to an installation at Square One in Mississauga, ON, in 2017.

This Profile was made possible through support from RBC Emerging Artists.