Artist and graphic designer Ivínguak’ Stork Høegh’s work combines eclectic elements of street art, pop culture, found imagery and a bold graphic sensibility, bringing vivid prismatic colour and Kalaallit stories to her vibrant collage work. Part of a family of artists, musicians, and cultural leaders spread across Kalaallit Nunaat and Denmark, Høegh was trained at the Det Jyske Kunstakademi in Aarhus, Denmark as a graphic and media artist. She is now based in Nuuk.
Her design work has been featured on stamps such as the 2021 World Oceans Day Greenland stamp, and the first scented Christmas stamp in 2018, as well as book illustrations, card designs, and more.
For her 2016 exhibition at the Nuuk Kunstmuseum, My Home—My Society Høegh used photography and collage to create layered images, using her own photographs of local people, architecture, and highly-detailed images of paint peeling from walls to depict the city of Nuuk and contemporary Kalaallit culture against the backdrop of globalization. Tackling issues such as addiction, care, and nationalism, the series borrows the aesthetics of street art and graffiti but with a soft, ethereal quality.
Ivínguak’ Stork Høegh Beach tour (2020)© THE ARTIST
Ongoing since 2013, her series of works Arctic Exotic explores notions of exoticism, juxtaposing images of life in Kalaallit Nunaat with people, animals and landscapes from tropical locations to reveal the complexities bound up in a fascination with and desire for the “exotic.” While the images are playful and vivid, they also reveal colonialism’s role in producing images of “exotic” people and places—from 19th century images of Kalaallit to images of safari animals, the capture of photographs by Europeans was part of a colonial process of conquest, exploration, expansion and exploitation. Rather than a pointed critique, Hoegh’s work offers a kind of questioning through hybridity, fusion and melding—examining the meeting points between cultures and the fractured lenses through which we encounter each other and the world.