Arctic Expressions: Reframing Perceptions of Indigenous Arctic Art

ON OUR RADAR | HAPPENINGS | WORLD OF CABANA

'Arctic Expressions', a British Museum partnership exhibition, challenges perceptions of Canadian and Alaskan Arctic regions as frozen, unchanging landscapes. Instead, it reveals vibrant color, seasonal transformation, and cultural expression—where art has long been woven into the fabric of Inuit and Alaska Native life. Shaped by shifting climates, colonial histories, migration and resilient traditions, the works assert their rightful place in the world of art, as examples of human, visual expression.

BY LUCREZIA LUCAS | HAPPENINGS | 15 JUNE 2025

Erin Ggaadimits Ivalu Gingrich (Koyukon Dené and Iñupiaq), Shedding Natchiayaaq from Kigiktaq. Basswood, glass, acrylic, 2024. © The Trustees of the British Museum © Erin Ggaadimits Ivalu Gingrich. 

In the northernmost stretches of Alaska and Canada—a region known for its polar summer sun and harsh, long winters—art has always existed in the everyday: stitched into sealskin clothing, incised on hunting tools, carved into bone, antler, and stone.

For generations, Indigenous communities have expressed their knowledge of the land, social memory, and spiritual belief through visual forms—often embedded in functional objects made for survival, ceremony, or seasonal use. Over the last 100 years, these expressions—once categorized as “craft”—have undergone a profound reframing.

The new British Museum partnership exhibition Arctic Expressions at Kirkleatham Museum in Redcar explores the art of Inuit and Alaska Native communities through 15 historic and contemporary works from the British Museum collection. Juxtaposing materials as old as an 18th-century seal decoy helmet with bold lithographs and stone sculptures from the 1990s, the exhibition offers a nuanced portrait of cultural continuity and evolution. 

The relationship between Indigenous communities and their environment recurs throughout, often with spiritual resonance. Seals—vital for food, clothing, and oil—carry both practical and symbolic significance, frequently linked to Sedna, the sea goddess found across Inuit cosmologies. Amulets carved in soapstone (steatite) or bone, hunting visors, and a walrus ivory bow drill engraved with caribou hunters—these pieces reflect a world in which nature and human life are deeply intertwined. 

'Playful Sedna' - Kakulu Sagiatuk © The Trustees of the British Museum © Kakulu Sagiatuk, Reproduced by permission of Dorset Fine Arts

This entwining of function and artistic form has a long lineage. Carving traditions date back to the Dorset culture (circa 800 BCE), and continued through the Thule people from 1000 CE. Miniatures, tools, masks, toys, and totems served as storytelling devices—ways of seeing the world through animals, transformation, and the surrounding landscape. Though animated by utility, these objects were never merely functional: they were carriers of knowledge, encoded with spiritual, social, and seasonal significance.

Transnational interest in Indigenous products grew with the influx of European whalers and missionaries. In 1749, the Hudson’s Bay Company began a (frequently exploitative) trade relationship with the Caribou Inuit (Kivallirmiut). Throughout the 18th and 19th centuries, trade items such as colourful beads, waterproof skins, and furs dyed with minerals like ochre and galena—as well as alder bark, moss, lichen, and berries—became highly sought after. Small carvings, such as cribbage boards, gained popularity among the 'tourists' journeying northward, offering the Inuit a source of income.

Dorset Fine Arts, established in 1978 as the wholesale marketing division of the West Baffin Eskimo Co-operative, © Kinngait Studio.

Although globalisation, climate change, and new opportunities have led many young Inuit and Alaska Native Peoples to leave the region, a strong connection to homeland and culture endures. One of the exhibition’s newest works is Shedding Natchiayaaq from Kigiktaq (2024), a carved wooden seal-mask by interdisciplinary artist Erin Ggaadimits Ivalu Gingrich.

Made of basswood and glass, the piece speaks to transformation in nature and self—how seals shift from snowy white pups to darker, ice-colored adults. Erin is among the many artists preserving traditional Native artistry while also reshaping it through personal experience and contemporary expression.

Based on an interview with Dr. Rose Taylor, Curator for North America at the British Museum

Arctic Expressions

June 7 - September 28 2025, Kirkleatham Museum, REDCAR, UK