by Ian Elliot
Northern News Services

INUVIK (Mar 13/98) - The bigger the better, is not a saying Martin Goodliffe puts much stock in.

The carver's Kugmallit Street studio is dotted with tiny, expressive pieces made from massive hunks of mastodon tusks, muskox skulls, caribou hooves and fossilized bone of all descriptions.

While many carvers strive for the big masterpiece, Goodliffe is proudest of pieces like one tiny walrus-tooth muskox, smaller than a person's thumb and destined to be mounted on a steeply-tilted rock in the name of accuracy.

"If you go along the coast at Sachs you'll see that all the time," Goodliffe explains, holding his arm almost vertically and speaking of the huge beasts with some affection.

"You'll have a rock tilted like this and there will be a muskox just standing around on it looking stupid."

Goodliffe's best-known creations are the Inukshuk earrings and pendants carved out of tusk and bone from which his business draws its name, but his rings and animals are taking up more of his time. Although he's done big work, like the wooden flagpole outside his house hand-hewn with an axe in the spirals of a narwhal tusk, he prefers to work in miniature.

"Small is beautiful," he said, noting the traditional carvings among the Inuit were tiny pieces that could be tucked into a parka pocket or parcel of household effects on the trail.

"Anybody can make big pieces, but you didn't see an Inuit making a big piece and kicking his wife and kids out of the sled so he could haul it around. They made small pieces that told stories."

Goodliffe has been in the North and carving for 18 years. He began not in a flash of inspiration, but after getting a look at the prices commanded for carvings here. Rather than pay a fortune to send gifts south, he figured he'd learn to do himself, and it didn't hurt that he was the son of a master machinist and a grandnephew of Emily Carr.

Ten years spent in Sachs Harbour, where he married his native wife and had ample time to soak in the wildlife and practise his craft, proved a fertile ground of ideas for his work and after a stint as an RCMP guard upon returning to Inuvik, Goodliffe is now working at making his carving a full-time job.

Even though his scale his small, the detail is precise and speaks of hours of finishing. His pendants are painstakingly doweled and pinned so they don't come apart as they would if simply glued and even his small birds have an accuracy about them that would please ornithologists.

"If you look at my birds, they always have one wing different than the other and their head is always slightly turned, because that's how birds actually fly," he said.

"I want to make an inanimate object look alive."

He works with a series of drills from large to dental, and finishes his work to a high gloss with a series of sandings and buffing wheels that leave a high gloss on the shaped piece of antler or tusk.

While his workshop is cluttered with a huge assortment of tusk, bone and ivory, Goodliffe's latest discovery and the one that has him the most excited is the black limestone found around Inuvik, most familiar as the material used for road gravel in the area. Polished to a high shine, Goodliffe sees it as the raw material for everything from tombstones to tables to depictions of the ubiquitous Northern raven.

"I like this Inuvik rock," says Goodliffe, placing an alabaster-white Inukshuk on a glossy pedestal of the material which picks up the carving's highlights and throws them back. "When it's finished it's like a mirror."