Sarah Ayaqi Whalen-Lunn is an Iñupiaq tattoo and multimedia artist who grew up in Dgheyaytnu (Anchorage), Alaska, and currently lives in Calgary, AB. Though she is best known for her printmaking and tattooing work, Whalen-Lunn works in other mediums, including painting, beading, drawing, and fibre. “I’m a process person and I’m a tactical person,” [1] she says, explaining her interest in working in so many different mediums.
Whalen-Lunn started her artistic practice with painting, primarily oil painting, and some large-scale hand-cut mosaic work. She took a pause in painting when she had children, turning her attention to drawing, embroidery, and beadwork. She became part of the Diaspora art collective, composed of Alaska Native artists, in 2013 and eventually started painting again that same year. In 2014 Whalen-Lunn expanded her practice to printmaking when a fellow artist from the Diaspora group asked her to create a print using a 5 x 5 ft piece of wood. With no experience, Whalen-Lunn taught herself how to carve, working on the piece for four months. “I’ve been 100 percent hooked on carving ever since,” [2] she says. “I’ve always just taught myself how to do things and battered things around until it looks the way that I want it to look.” She has since created prints for different shows in Alaska, including a commission for the Anchorage Museum. “I like to work big, and I really love to work in wood when I’m doing prints like that,” she says. While she loves to create large-scale work, Whalen-Lunn also creates smaller linocut pieces.
In 2013 Whalen-Lunn became interested in a cultural revitalization project initiated by Iñupiaq artist Holly Nordlum to reintroduce tattooing for Inuit women in Alaska. “I was fascinated because I didn’t know that we had tattoos. That was a piece of art history I had no clue about,” she says. Whalen-Lunn was one of three Iñupiaq women in Alaska chosen by two instructors and the museum in Anchorage to receive traditional hand-poke and skin-stitch training as part of this project. Through this training, Whalen-Lunn learned from a Western tattoo mentor as well as an Inuit tattoo artist. The training she received was emotional and healing for Whalen-Lunn. “This is what my world has been building to,” she says. After this experience, she created her business, Inkstitcher, and began posting her work on Instagram and has become a well-known tattoo artist. “I am obsessive about what I can do with one ink colour and one dot at a time,” she says. She has been part of several tattoo gatherings in Canada and the United States. In 2024 she was a panelist on the discussion about kakiniit and tunniit at the ᕿᓐᓂᕋᔮᑦᑐᖅ Qinnirajaattuq / Ripples: Making Waves in Inuit Art symposium in Montreal, QC.
Though she already had experience with beading, Whalen-Lunn started making jewellery more seriously in 2020 when the pandemic hit and she had to cancel all of her tattoo bookings. “All [of] the sudden, all our lives had to shift,” she says. Jewellery-making began as an activity she did with her children and quickly turned into another medium to work in for Whalen-Lunn. “I wanted to make jewellery that is big, that expresses the fact that we’re here, but also honours the animals that we work with and that sustain us,” she says. Her earrings Salmon Mothers (2024) feature intricate beadwork that depicts the heads and bodies of fish. The long strands of beads, transitioning from dark blue to turquoise to red and black, mimic colourful fish scales.
Whalen-Lunn’s work has been part of several exhibitions, including -miut (2024) at the Mitchell Art Gallery in Edmonton, AB. She also created all of the artwork featured in season four of True Detective, Night Country (2024).
After moving to Calgary in 2023, Whalen-Lunn became involved in a wearable art residency at Sparrow Art Gallery, which enabled her to join the collective of Indigenous artists and eventually participate in a year-long wearable art residency at TRUCK Contemporary Art in 2024. The work she created during this residency was presented in the exhibition With every stitch I imagine a world (2025).
One of the main elements of Whalen-Lunn’s artistic practice is integrating parts of different mediums. “One of my things with teaching myself new skills is that I can take it and bring it into everything else. Let my brain and my emotions go wild,” she says. Her piece Migration (2024) is a large necklace that features wet and needle felting and is embroidered with long leather and beaded fringe. My Mother’s Scarf or Other Important Things We Forgot to Remember (2024) is a coat made of pieces of fabric that hold meaning to Whalen-Lunn and other people. In 2024, she started learning how to tan fish skin from Janey Chang and soon after started travelling with Western Arctic Youth Collective, assisting Chang in some fishskin-tanning workshops in regions like in Ikaahuk (Sachs Harbour), Inuvialuit Settlement Region, NT, and Ulukhaqtuuq, Inuvialuit Settlement Region, NT. At home, Whalen-Lunn tans her materials the traditional way, with urine. “My interest really lies in the urine tanning, being able to bring it up North and show people what a beautiful product you can get from our traditional ways,” she says.
“I’m constantly trying to put some sort of representation about our world, meaning us, Inuit…letting the world know that we’re here and we’re thriving and we all look different,” she says. Artmaking for Whalen-Lunn is an integral part of her working through emotions and dealing with the world. “I think that it is as important to me as breathing, as far as being able to process my emotions and the things that are happening in the world.” [3]