Tarralik Duffy has always followed her instincts as an artist and they are serving her well.
“I think I always had this sense that maybe I wanted to be an artist, but I felt I couldn’t be, and I didn’t know how people became artists or what that magic thing was that they had,” she said two days before her solo exhibition, Gasoline Rainbows, opened at the Winnipeg Art Gallery-Qaumajuq (WAG) on Sept. 22. “I just kind of stumbled into it by following my instincts and not really realizing what I was doing, because it started with just needing to work with my hands and quiet the noise in my head.”
Gasoline Rainbows opened two years after Duffy received the prestigious Kenojuak Ashevak Memorial Award, which was created by WAG and the Inuit Art Foundation to support Inuit artists across all media.
The award came with a $20,000 prize and a two-month artist residency, and paved the way for Duffy’s solo exhibition, all of which would have been difficult for her to imagine as a girl experimenting with art in Coral Harbour.
“[My younger self] would probably think it’s funny because, for many years, I kind of lamented living in Nunavut because you’re just watching TV in the ’80s, and it seemed like the world was anywhere but my backyard, and everything that was happening that was important didn’t seem to be happening where I was,” she said.
“I sort of chased after that,” she added. “Then it was that cliche of realizing, ‘Oh everything that is important is at home.’ I had it the whole time I was growing up. Everything that I needed, all the lessons and all the beauty and all the richness that I thought was out of my reach was right there in front of me the whole time.”
Duffy’s home and childhood are both reflected in the pieces on display in her Winnipeg exhibition, which is a mix of two-dimensional digital drawings and soft sculptures made of leather.
She’s proud of the exhibition as a whole, but there are two pieces she’s particularly eager to share with guests.
One of those pieces will be the focal point of the show: a large-scale can of Klik, the popular brand of luncheon meat.
The other, she said, is the only work on display that was not part of her original plan for the show. Instead, it came to her in an unexpected burst of inspiration while she was working on her Klik can.
“Everything else I had to plan to make based on the theme of the show,” she said. “In the middle of that, I was working with this blubber pink, Barbie pink leather, and it reminded me of my auntie one time. We were sitting there eating tuktu quaq (frozen meat), and she said it was so delicious, she could chew it like a big piece of bubble gum. Looking at this leather reminded me of that, so I drew this riff on Bubble Yum, that gum from the ‘80s, but it’s like Blubber Yum.
“It’s like this madness took over me and I abandoned everything else,” she added. “I was drawing and sewing all the time. I just had to make this piece, and to me, it’s my favourite.”
While Duffy is pleased with the art she created for Gasoline Rainbows, she admitted it was difficult to be excited about it in the lead-up, as she worked frantically to make sure all of her pieces were ready.
Now that the exhibition is open, she hopes to enjoy some downtime before shifting her focus to other creative projects. She isn’t sure what she will create next, but said the instincts that have been serving her so well are now telling her to write.
“For the first time in a long time, I just want to write for myself,” she said. “Writing a book seems so intimidating, but the ruminations of that are bubbling a little bit.
“I just want to follow my instincts, and right now writing is calling to me.”