Michele LeTourneau
Northern News Services

Rankin Inlet (Nov 08/99) - The Nunavut legislative assembly has purchased its very first piece of art, a ceramic piece called Square Dance. The artist is Roger Aksadjuaq, based at the Matchbox Gallery in Rankin Inlet.

"Roger is very happy about it," says Jim Shirley, who runs the gallery/studio space.

"He is an artist. You have people who do the stuff because they make money at it, then you have people who love to do it and because they love to do it, they do it better than anybody. He's one of those. He loves to work with clay. The clay loves him.

"Some people struggle with it. I've got to force the clay to do what I want it to do. The clay does whatever he wants it to do. He just touches it and it says, 'OK Rog, which way? This way or that way?' He is a master at this medium."

The Matchbox Gallery doubles as a work shop, a place where art is not only shown, but also made.

Shirley feels the purchase of Aksadjuaq's work is a great honour for the artists of the Matchbox Gallery.

"It's really important to us. You gotta get people to know about this stuff and we had a lot of trouble in that respect. We had to go through a lot of growth and learning... but we got to the point that we got this nice thing that happened."

Matchbox Gallery opened its doors 13 years ago.

"We basically started out as a cross-cultural gallery and workshop. There was no place, really, for people to see art."

Shirley is African-American, originally from New York, and though he comes from a big city, he admits to always having felt an affinity with the Inuit community he has called his home for over 20 years.

When he arrived, art was sold in shops but not there was no gallery proper.

"And (this is) not so much a commercial gallery," Shirley says about Matchbox, "but a place where artists could show their work."

When the gallery first opened, Shirley and his wife, Susan, taught courses and helped foster some of the region's artists, at a time when "Arctic College had no real presence."

"About six years ago we set up a new addition, which was a ceramics facility and a printmaking facility."

The aim, says Shirley, was to see if the now- defunct Rankin Inlet Ceramics Project, run by the government for six years and shut down in the early 1970s, could be successfully revived.

"We started with brand-new artists and two of the older artists from the original project. Those two artists sort of got everything going and showed the people the basic techniques that they recalled from the time when they were doing ceramics. "Technically, what we do is what the artists from the original project have laid the foundation for."

The Matchbox Gallery also promotes the exchange of ideas and techniques by bringing in artists from Canada, the United States and South America.

"We've had a lot of interesting artists come through here from different places."

Shirley likes to think of the gallery as the breeding ground for ideas and thinking. His approach comes from the fact that he is an artist, as is his wife.

"I think that's our strength," he says.

"What we're doing here has artistic importance, I think. And it's community-based. It's taken us a long time to technically get a handle on what we're doing. But we got it now, we got it nailed," adds Shirley with pride.

"Instead of being something where you're just cranking out money, it's something with an artistic foundation."