November 12, 1998

FCNQ stuck with thousands of inferior carvings

JANE GEORGE
Nunatsiaq News

BAIE-D'URFE - With its thousands of carvings on display, the showroom at the Fédération des coopératives du Nouveau-Québec resembles a soapstone city.

But among masterpieces by renowned artists like Mattiusi Iyaituk or Peter Boy Ittukalak are numerous other carvings that are inferior, with poor workmanship and little creativity.

While these may have sold back in the 1970s or the 1980s, such work is now mostly impossible to sell.

"Retailers are not buying poor works," the FCNQ's Bernard Murdoch reported to its board at a recent meeting.

In September, Murdoch says he went to a gift fair in Toronto where Nunavik's carvings compared favorably to those from other Arctic regions. But these were Nunavik's the top-of-the-line works.

The FCNQ's member coops have bought more than $500,000 worth of carving since the beginning of 1998, yet the co-ops already re-sell the good ones to visitors in the North.

"If we start to lose the best of what is produced, promoting the art will be difficult," said Murdoch. "It will hurt the industry in the long run."

To upgrade the quality of carvings in the showroom, Murdoch plans to warehouse some of the poorer carvings to make room for more seemingly marketable ones.

"It's easy to say what it's not, but it's not easy to see what it is," he said.

He came away with no clear answers from the recent meeting on carving that was held in Cape Dorset.

"There's no easy solution," Murdoch said. "People are going to lose their livelihood before the market stabilizes."