Moving with joy across the ice while my face turns brown from the sun

Every April, community members from Maureen Gruben’s hometown of Tuktoyaktuk expertly pack family sleds with everything they need to live on the land, and hitch them to skidoos. They cross miles of frozen tundra to gather at Husky Lakes where they set up their canvas tents and off-grid cabins for the spring ice fishing season. On a sunny day in early spring the landscape at Husky Lakes is both brilliant and minimal, consisting simply of a dazzling expanse of snow under vivid sky. An absolute silence that few people will encounter in their lives is punctuated with sociable chatting as friends and relations meet each other at fishing holes, and with the occasional buzz of augurs, the periodic approach and departure of skidoos.

Sleds have always been an integral part of Inuvialuit life and many are still hand-built. Idiosyncrasies of carpentry techniques and rope knotting trace a material, deeply personal relationship to their makers, and these traces become more pronounced as the sleds are mended over the years to increase their life-span. For Moving with joy across the ice while my face turns brown from the sun, Maureen borrowed fourteen hand-built sleds and brought them together into a short-duration land art installation that has been photographically documented. Each sled is intimately connected to a family that has created, used, and maintained it over years, and their grouping here speaks to the absolutely necessary strength of community in the Arctic.

An engagement with objects built for traversing this specific landscape has an intrinsic connection to the erosion of this land, and the melting of the ice on which people and animals have lived and hunted for thousands of years. As such, Moving with joy across the ice while my face turns brown from the sun offers vitally important perspectives on a rapidly changing environment and way of life. The deeply social, distinctively personal elements at play here convey ways in which we, as humans, are communally and individually embedded in the land