Haiga Ashoona

Haiga Ashoona is an artist from Kinngait, NU, who works with duffle and felt to create textile wallhangings. Now based in Iqaluit, NU, Ashoona primarily sells her work in person through the town or through local sell/swap gatherings, methods that allow her to connect with the community.

Ashoona comes from a highly artistic family; she learned the mechanics of sewing from her grandmother as a child, but it was during a visit with her sister, the sculptor Goota Ashoona, that her artistic practice was formed as an adult. “She encouraged me,” says Ashoona, reminiscing about that time. [1] “As soon as my sister told me to start, I drew and drew.” While her initial focus was on making mini sealskin kamiks and mitts, Ashoona has since transitioned to wallhangings. she begins her pieces by drawing shapes with paper and pen, refining the outlines until she is happy enough with the shape to cut them out and use them as a pattern. From there, Ashoona transfers the images to felt and stitches them up. 

Laid out on brightly coloured felts in all the colours of the rainbow, the subjects Ashoona depicts draw from her past growing up on the land with her grandparents, as well as Inuit traditional ways of life. She frequently features iglus, highly stylized inuksuit that can look almost like flowers or starfish, and polar bears. “We used to live in a cabin where there were lots of polar bears,” she says about the bears’ prevalence in her work. Depicting traditional ways of life and the happy memories of her childhood bolster Ashoona; to her, art provides a kind of healing. “It helps me to recover…to forget,” she says, adding that she enjoys sewing “every minute when I do it.” This joy in her work is visible in the pieces she creates: tiny, precise stitches secure the pieces to the backing, often so small they are difficult to see, unless Ashoona has purposefully used a larger stitch and contrasting thread to add detail, like picking out the blocks of an iglu or the trim on a parka.

Ashoona’s work has been bought and displayed through the Gallery of the Midnight Sun in Yellowknife, NT, as well as Carvings Nunavut and the Nunatta Sunakkutaangit Museum in Iqaluit. In the future she hopes to create larger-scale wallhangings, and begin investigating painting as a medium to add to her repertoire.