Ghost Noise

"I do not draw simply the surface of the landscape. I feel I am capturing the breath and soul of the earth," explains artist Shuvinai Ashoona. The same might be said of the impressionistic film portrait that Marcia Connolly has made of her. The film works with a similar medley of textures as Ashoona's characteristic pencil drawings, with their images of everyday life in the icy Canadian North and the mythological and religious symbolism percolating through it. Connolly shows Ashoona at work in the Kinngait Studios where she has been working for over 15 years, and in the surrounding streets and landscapes of Cape Dorset, a small hamlet in the Canadian territory of Nunavut. We discover what it means to the mischievous Ashoona to be an artist and how the source of her art in traditional Inuit culture is shot through with Western modernity. "I want to speak in Inuktitut," says the artist, "but I always slip into English. Changing directions, that's how I am."