Sculpted Stories: Manasie Akpaliapik’s Shape-driven Practice

Content note: This article contains discussions of suicide and the high Arctic Inuit relocations. Support is available 24 hours a day for those affected and/or who may be triggered by this content at Talk Suicide Canada, 1-833-456-4566 or Hope for Wellness Helpline, 1-855-242-3310.

The Inuit Art Quarterly’s Tauttunnguaqti, Napatsi Folger, examines how Manasie Akpaliapik’s work sheds light on difficult realities many Inuit have endured by expressing nuanced emotions in a challenging medium. Akpaliapik honours his childhood love of Inuit traditional storytelling with shape-driven pieces that feature otherworldly creatures and powers from beyond our realm. 

Inuk sculptor and drum dancer Manasie Akpaliapik has been a prolific artist for over 45 years. Akpaliapik’s fluidity as a creative thinker and ability to switch gears depending on his access to materials make for a diverse and interesting body of work, and his dynamism extends even further when you consider what shapes his inspiration. I’ve long wondered what pushes Akpaliapik to create, so when I recently had the chance to interview him, I asked him about his creative process. During our interview, Akpaliapik spoke about his creative process. He noted that he usually has general ideas of what he would like to create, be they visual depictions of Inuit oral stories or significant emotional or cultural events in Inuit history, but when it comes to beginning a project, he finds inspiration in the actual shape of his materials, which ultimately dictates the stories he wants to tell.

For Akpaliapik, the name of the game is layering social issues and cultural expression into all the art he creates. He credits his artist grandparents, Elisapee and Peter Kanangnaq Ahlooloo, as his first inspirations. As a child, he would watch them work on their art and listen to their stories about Inuit history and oral tradition. The other main underlying theme in Akpaliapik’s work is powerful social commentary. Over his 45-year career, he has finely tuned his ability to visually express difficult emotions in works like Untitled (1991), a sculpture that relates to the suffering that goes along with alcohol abuse. 

Personal tragedy necessitated Akpaliapik’s move to Montreal, QC, in the 1980s, and he says that was the period when he succumbed to alcohol abuse to cope. The pain of the subject in Untitled is visceral; Akpaliapik uses asymmetry to great effect, amplifying the emotional tone of suffering with addiction by using visual imbalance and rough textures. His subject has one eye covered, so the initial view of the face is immediately unsettling. The alcohol bottle sticking out of the subject’s head triggers a similar neurological response—seeing something protrude from a skull is a universal visual cue for wrongness. Akpaliapik even uses the bone’s porous texture to give his subject a dishevelled look. Maybe the marks are meant to be a beard grown unkempt out of depression, or perhaps they are alcohol-induced acne. Regardless of the backstory, the image of how it feels to carry the oppressive weight of addiction is broadcast clearly in all of the subtle choices Akpaliapik made for this piece.

Another example of a piece that serves as strong social commentary is his 1992 piece Suicide Story, one side of which depicts two large faces side by side, looking sombre. Akpaliapik uses the empty space between the faces to draw the eye down to a smaller, full-body figure of an Inuk suspended, limp, with a real bullet casing embedded in their abdomen. This sculpture depicts a real-life crisis in all Inuit communities in the wake of colonization, and one that is familiar to Akpaliapik.

He is acutely aware of the emotional power of art and has a natural sense of how to use spatial balance in his sculptures to evoke specific emotions. In Suicide Story, he uses the shape of the material to visually guide the viewer through the narrative he wants to tell. Though the victim is centred in the core of the bone, the mourning faces are significantly larger, highlighting the impact of the event over the event itself on one side of the structure. Like huge giants, the two Inuit tower over the central body, crying. The mourners’ faces are precisely carved, with expressive eyes, numerous facial lines, and contours that imbue the subjects with individuality. Akpaliapik incises detail into this piece that gives the mourners their own identity. He gives them uniqueness to honour their mourning. The sculpture exemplifies the devastating effect that suicide has on communities. You see it in the irises of his two mourners, dug deep enough to create shadows and depth while maintaining crisp lines and avoiding too much mottled texture from exposing the porous bone beneath.

On the other side of the sculpture, we get an internal look at the suffering in this story. In the centre is a large face looking skyward, flanked by symmetrical babies in utero and several pained faces that are the physical embodiment of tortured souls. Some are yelling out in pain while others show almost human faces that become grotesquely inhuman at the mouth, where Akpaliapik has rendered their teeth as almost melting, and if not melting, certainly inhumanly long.

Whale bone is a favourite material for Akpaliapik, and when you look at the variability of his many whale vertebrae sculptures, you see how different each piece can look using the same types of bone. This is illustrated perfectly in his piece Drumdancer Riding on the Backs of the Owls in his Song (2022), which highlights the familiar vertebral shape of the material. Here the subject matter, a drum dancer, is more abstract than a lot of Akpaliapik’s usually detailed renderings of Inuit forms.

For this piece, the artist works within the narrow limitations of his medium to create the striking form. We see a long and slender human figure, to accommodate the narrow tip of the vertebral bone. My guess is that when Akpaliapik, who is an accomplished drum dancer, saw the piece of uncarved bone, he saw a resemblance between the particular angles of the wing-like projections from the central mass of bone and owl wings in mid-flight. Perhaps, having danced to the owl song himself, he was inspired to create this striking sculpture.

Another example of a vertebrae sculpture that uses the natural shape while looking distinctly different is his 1989 sculpture Drum Dancer, in which an Inuk man who has two heads attached at the top stands drumming and singing with wide-open mouths. In conversation with Akpaliapik, I learned that one head represents the subject’s own head and the other is his ancestors coming down to help him with chanting and inspire the beating rhythm of his drum. We see the man mid-song, the gaping “O” of each mouth as he chants, and the wide flare of his nostrils evokes that pause at the end of a deep breath, the moment before you belt out the notes you know will rise into a shiver-inducing crescendo.

Aesthetics and craftsmanship aside, this piece is captivating with its fluid form and pulsing energy. Akpaliapik, whose penchant for fine detail is undeniable, also seamlessly incorporates the natural contours of the vertebra into the figure’s pose, with the heads thrown back so far the figure looks almost like a contortionist. It’s no wonder Akpaliapik has such skill when it comes to rendering natural forms in alabaster, steatite, osseous tissue, and all the other materials he chooses to work in. He spoke about Drum Dancer in particular to illustrate his working process: “I didn’t put the heads there, because the heads were already there. This shows you that I’m working with the shape of the material; I’m just following the shape of the material more or less, and it works, sometimes.” 

This insight clarifies something interesting about the creativity Akpaliapik wields: he’s practical and knowledgeable and can shift his style and approach his work differently depending on the physical limitations of his materials. He and his wife, Annie, explained to me that while all bones are porous inside, some have more cortical or compact bone, which is the dense outer layer. The thicker the cortical bone, the deeper he can sculpt into this smooth non-porous layer of bone, giving the artwork more dimension. When the cortical bone is thin and Akpaliapik doesn’t want to work too deeply into the spongy porous bone underneath, he tends to make shallower cuts and almost draws into the bone, like gliding a chisel through linoleum in relief printing.

His latest large-scale sculpture, titled Resilience (2024), exemplifies his etching style and his passion for articulating important Inuit stories. The massive 1.5 x 1.8 x 0.7 metre sculpture is made from the skull of a bowhead whale his brother-in-law found in Ausuittuq (Grise Fiord), NU. Akpaliapik says that he had been wanting to create a piece that honoured real experiences of the groups of Inuit who had been relocated to the High Arctic. Akpaliapik himself was relocated with his family as a child from Mittimatalik (Pond Inlet) to Ausuittuq (Grise Fiord), NU and later moved to Ikpiarjuk (Arctic Bay), NU, so this was a particularly personal piece.

When he found out that his brother-in-law had found the skull on the route that Inuit had travelled during those historical relocations, it was cosmically obvious that this was the material to tell those stories. While the sculpture is meant to celebrate the resilience of Inuit who had been relocated, it is also meant to be an ode to a shaman named Qillarsuaq. Qillarsuaq lived in the area of south-eastern Baffin Island, close to modern-day Panniqtuuq, NU, and had to move his people (by foot and boat) to Pitorarvik in northern Kalaallit Nunaat. Akpaliapik spoke at length about the piece and its meaning: “These are amazing events that happened that are a part of our history, and the people that were moved up [to the High Arctic] still talk about it today, and tell stories about it. They survived this, and they succeeded. Now there are communities there; that’s something to celebrate about!”

It’s a breath of fresh air to hear in Akpaliapik’s own words the pride and lightness with which he talks about a part of Inuit history that was so damaging and mishandled. Instead of focusing on the difficulty or the trauma that surrounds that history, Resilience is a showcase of the importance and beauty of connectivity. The way Akpaliapik uses images of feathers, tattoo lines, and hair that move in the direction of striated bone tissue, or the natural curve of the material, to connect disparate elements together is both aesthetically appealing and representative of the interconnectivity of Inuit existence. Akpaliapik spoke about valuing the meaning and symbols of traditional tattoos and wanted to show those elements in this piece as documentation of important Inuit history in contemporary art and to display our beautiful motifs. His inclusion of extensive kakiniit and tunniit gives the audience a sense of the artist’s reverence for his cultural traditions. These tattoos are a visual connection to our Inuit ancestors that transcend time.  

While Akpaliapik’s creative process is deeply contingent on the shape of his raw material, it’s clear that his art practice and subject matter cannot be compartmentalized into neat categories. It’s not always a single definable thing or moment in time that drives creative processes. “A lot of times when I’m working I don’t even know what I’m doing. [laughter] And at the end I think, ‘Oh! That’s what it’s [the material is] saying! That’s what’s happening here.’ That’s what makes it fun.”

Akpaliapik draws heavily from both personal and societal struggles in much of his work. It’s an element of his art that has always attracted me to his sculptures. After speaking with him about aspects of life, his inspiration behind his pieces, and his creative process, I felt humbled as an Inuk. To see so many complex feelings—joy and fortitude, despair and pain—depicted so vividly in his works is the mark of a skilled and thoughtful artist and a true inummarik—a genuine, well-balanced person. 

Napatsi Folger is the Tauttunnguaqti responsible for the creative vision at the Inuit Art Quarterly. She is an Inuk editor, comic artist, fiction, non-fiction, and children's literature writer from Iqaluit, NU, now living in the traditional and unceded territory of theMusqueam (xʷməθkʷəy̓əm), Squamish (Sḵwx̱wú7mesh Úxwumixw) and Tsleil-Waututh (səlilwətaɬ) Nations. She graduated from the University of British Columbia with an MFA in creative writing in 2021.

This Feature was originally published as “Sculpted Stories Manasie Akpaliapik's Shape-driven Practice” in the Fall 2026 issue of the Inuit Art Quarterly.

Notes 

1 All quotes Manasie Akpaliapik, interview with Napatsi Folger, June 2026.