Saelym Degrandpre

With a strong focus on themes of femininity, womanhood and Inuit storytelling traditions, Ottawa, ON-based artist Saelym Degrandpre works primarily in oil and acrylics as well as digital illustration and printmaking. Passionate about educating others on her art and culture, Degrandpre has partnered in the past with the Eastern Ontario Catholic Curriculum Corporation to create educational videos for public school students on the process of printmaking. Creating all her life, she credits the Ottawa Inuit Children’s Centre with her early education on her language and culture, which has gone on to inspire her artwork into adulthood.

Inspired by Inuit oral history and storytelling as well as traditional tattoo patterns, Degrandpre frequently creates imagery of the female form, often adorned in tattoos or traditional clothing. Some of her work also comes with a message, such as one of her illustrations of an Inuk woman wearing a brilliant red amauti.

“I draw a lot of women in traditional clothes,” she explains, “My drawing of a woman in the red amauti is for missing and murdered indigenous women. Knowing a lot of women who have been hurt, I wanted to draw awareness to it.” [1]

Currently, Degrandpre is pursuing her studies at Algonquin College in General Arts and Indigenous Studies.  She is already an accomplished public artist and in 2018 she was among seven young artists that completed a mural for the Overbrook Community Centre in Ottawa, ON and has had her work featured on Christmas card collections produced by Ottawa-based Indigenous organization Nattiq in 2019.



This Profile was made possible through support from the RBC Foundation’s Emerging Artists Project.