St. Lawrence University: Festival of the Arts

Monday, February 26, 4:00-5:30 p.m. Blackbox Theatre

Stone carving demonstration by David Ruben Piqtoukun

Slide lecture by David Ruben Piqtoukun

Piqtoukun will give a stone carving demonstration of a work-in-progress and a slide presentation. In his demonstration, he will show carvings in various stages of completion, using Brazilian soapstone to demonstrate the nature, difficulty, and techniques of carving. During this interactive demonstration, Piqtoukun hopes to answer questions related to the origin of his ideas, the materials he chooses, and the final images he uses to represent his culture. Piqtoukun's wife, Katherine, will join him in the demonstration. "To be creating," he writes, "and creative simultaneously, two heads are required." In his slide presentation, Piqtoukun will speak of "my early beginnings in stone carving and my Eskimo origin and home," as well as how "stone carving gives me greater knowledge of my Eskimo past and the beliefs which co-exist with the environment of animals, spirit world, and the land."

Ledge Rock Stone Quarry, Wiarton, Ontario
September 2000

David Ruben Piqtoukun has been a sculptor for nearly thirty years. His work has achieved international renown and has been exhibited in the National Gallery of Canada, the McMichael Canadian Art Collection, and the Winnipeg Art Gallery, as well as in the United States, Mexico, the Ivory Coast, China, and England. For most of his childhood, Piqtoukun was sent to boarding schools. He writes, "I had lost my language and native Eskimo ways. Living in the south made my identity more difficult to comprehend. I was lost between two worlds.... The stone carving process teaches me many rituals of my people: hunting practices, healing, animals, spirit helpers, centuries-old customs for travel and weather pushing (sky pushing techniques), respect for elders, parents, animals, inanimate and animate objects, but most of all the spirit world of the Eskimo people."