Jennifer Geens
Northern News Services

Yellowknife (Sep 01/03) - Award-winning carver Derrald Taylor has devoted himself to his art full-time since he moved from Tuktoyaktuk to Yellowknife 10 years ago. He explains why there's nothing worse than a square block of rock.

yklife: What differences have you found between Tuktoyaktuk and Yellowknife?

Derrald Taylor: As an artist you have more access to galleries here, which is a big difference. Here you can do a lot more carvings and move a lot more. In Tuk you have very little choice. You sell to people and if they quit buying, you've got nobody else to sell to. My first four or five years here I did a lot of footwork, meeting people, showing my pieces. Now the gallery owners know me.

yklife: You won the People's Choice award for Carving at the Great Northern Arts Festival in Inuvik, what other awards have you won?

DT: This is my second People's Choice award. The last one was in 2002. I was the featured artist in 2002, and had my carving on their posters. Then this year I won my second people's choice award and my sister won the artist's choice award. It's been a big promotion for me. The festival's done a lot, not only for me.

yklife: Is your whole family in the arts?

DT: There's me, my two brothers carve, my two sisters and my nephew. So there's six of us. And my dad, so that's seven. We all learned the basics from my father. He works a lot in caribou bone and antler. So he taught us the basics, what tools we could use, what we could use for carving. Then back in the early 90s we started with soapstone. We didn't know anything about soapstone until then.

yklife: Does the kind of material you're carving change your approach?

DT: There's soapstone, antler, ivory and whalebone that we use. There's different textures, different hardness. The ivory is more difficult to work with. You do a lot more miniature stuff with it, like jewellery. And caribou antler, you could do a little out of it but not very much. The soapstone is good, you can get it in various sizes anywhere from one pound to 2, 3, 400 pound pieces. And they come in different colours. There's variety. With whalebone and antler you can only do so much with them.

yklife: How do you choose your stone?

DT: I try to find out what is easier for people to buy. What kind of carvings they like. I try to stick more to the harder stone. Dark green and the black and the white stone, they're a lot harder to work with, but people prefer the harder stone. I really like the green serpentine stone from the eastern Arctic, because you can do a lot of intricate detail with it. They're not as easy to break and they're really easy to work with.

yklife: How do you find your carving within the stone?

DT: Lots of times we'll get a square block. And I think square blocks are the hardest things to work on, because you can't picture what you're going to make out of it. So you chop it up, you get off all the corners, then you can see what you're going to do out of it. You can see how you want the body of the animal or the human, the drum dancer or hunter, or mythical figures. You've got to chop your way into it.

yklife: It's easier if the stone is an odd shape?

DT: Yeah. You can let it sit there and sit there, and all you see is the square. If you grab a piece off the ground like this (he points to a rock in parking lot), you can follow the shape of it.

If it's square you can't. I think the majority of carvers are like that. You've got to have a different shape. Not a square.

yklife: How do you transform an idea into a final, finished piece?

DT: People come along and ask you how did you get this idea? Out of looking at the stone? And it's hard to explain it. We just do it. Sometimes you can do it better than how you pictured it and it makes you wonder where it came from.

yklife: Do you carve full-time?

DT: These last 10 years, yes. I've had part-time jobs in between, but now that I've got my wife and kids I spend a lot of time with my wife and kids. My wife has a job, and me, I do the carvings. We split our time with the kids. She goes to work daytimes, and evenings and weekends, I get the chance to carve down in my shop. Do as much as I can do. Most of my income comes out of the carvings.

yklife: Are you ever sorry to let them go?

DT: I've had a few pieces that I really liked and I regretted letting them go. For those pieces I deal more with private buyers, so I know it's going to be there to stay. I've had two that I can remember that I didn't really want to let go of, but I make my living off it, so I just gave it up. I still think about them. And I'll still see them once in a while. Some day when I have my own house and everything, I'll collect my own pieces, along with whatever I can make that I like.

yklife: What happens when a carving goes wrong?

DT: Well it depends how far you got into the piece. Do you have room enough to change it or do something else with it? There's some pieces that can't be changed, so you just use them as a show piece, a teaching piece. You don't throw them away.

yklife: Do you teach?

DT: I used to teach kids in the schools. That was years ago. I was still learning myself. I was like them once. I was that kid asking the carver, "How did you do that?" There are a lot of kids who come by and want to learn soapstone carving, jewellery carving. It's fun. You just have to be careful how many you're going to teach. At Inuvik at the festival, we get a lot of kids coming by, so I'd tell them come back at this time and I'll show you some stuff. So this kid came back a couple of hours later and I made him a little carving and the next thing I know all these kids are asking "Can you do this, do that?" Finally after five or six pieces I had to stop. But it was fun. The kids were all full of questions.