Daron Letts
Northern News Services

Baker Lake (Aug 22/05) - What started out as a three-week stint in Baker Lake has turned into a 10-year stay for jewelry maker Karen Yip.

After teaching in the community for a few weeks in 1995, her stay extended to three months and then three years. She now makes her home in the community.

BR> Karen Yip and her latest precious project, Janae. Yip arrived in Baker Lake in 1995 expecting to stay for only three weeks. She's been there since, carving and making jewelry using precious and semi precious metals, as well as caribou bones, antlers, teeth, fur, hooves, rocks with dried lichen and old wood.

Yip started working in the North in the late 1980s, driving up from Vancouver for teaching contracts.

She taught jewelry making and metalwork on a casual basis through the Nunavut Arctic College, leading classes and workshops for several weeks at a time in Clyde River, Cambridge Bay, Iqaluit and Baker Lake.

"Over that time I've gone from European-styles of high-end jewelry to different media using natural materials," she said.

In addition to precious and semi precious metals, she uses caribou bones, antlers, teeth, fur, hooves, rocks with dried lichen and old wood in her sculptures and jewelry.

Yip builds wearable sculptures, including a tiara with a removable necklace made of 18 carat gold and pearls that placed first in an Australian competition.

She often does commissioned pieces. She likes to work with people to personalize jewelry. She recently made a wedding band for a man that depicts a Northern treescape.

"I like to do things that have meaning to them rather than the generic items bought from a store," she said.

In 1999, after finishing her work for the college, she formed the Saviirgayak Society, named for the word meaning "precious metals," with about 10 of her former students.

The society rents space in the Jessie Oonark Centre where the artists developed a collection of pieces two years ago. The society members sold their works at galleries in Victoria, B.C., and Lunenburg, NS, while studying through the college.

They planned to tour nationally and internationally with their work but are now organizing an exhibition at a southern gallery to document and sell their pieces.

Many of the works are built out of metal sheets and wire hammered into shape, cut and filed, then soldered together. The artists do some metal casting with cuttle fish bone or wax, as well.

"I find metal an interesting medium to work with," Yip said. "To get something as solid and rigid as metal to move and create something that didn't exist before is satisfying."