RANKIN INLET - Rankin Inlet's Matchbox Gallery is preparing to start a new project for posterity. The 23-year-old artists' collective and gallery will soon start creating a book and a website to highlight the work done by its artists.

"We're going to make our own history, we're going to document our own work," said founder Jim Shirley.

"It's necessary. If you do something like this you have to honour it by documenting it."

The art will remain but the collective works of the gallery need to be gathered together and showcased, he said.

"We're going to document works in progress," Shirley said. "So that forever there will be something that talks about this place and what it accomplished.

"One of the important parts of what we're doing here is we're working with the artists as a whole person, we're not working with the artist as a source of things for other people to buy," he said.

The art classes offered daily by the gallery include literacy and math skills. Shirley said since a lot of the artists belonging to the collective come from economically disadvantaged backgrounds they are in need of support, both as artists and as human beings.

The collective provides a place to gather for friendship, support and arts training.

"I try to come here every day," said Helen Iguptak, an artist who joined the collective after retiring from teaching in 2007.

"You have more time to yourself when you're doing it at Matchbox," she said, adding, "When you go home you're busy with friends and relatives."

What makes Matchbox unique, said Shirley, is the fact it is a gallery constantly full of artists.

"There are millions of galleries but you don't see the people hanging around, you just see their stuff. Those people come over here and we provide them with support and encouragement and a source of confidence," he said.

A new semester of Traditional Arts workshops has just started and runs from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. five days a week for the next 13 to 14 weeks.

Iguptak teaches Inuktitut literacy during the Traditional Arts classes.

"We are here pretty much full-time," she said.

She said she has seen improvement in the literacy and math skills of some of the other students.

"It's very important. Today is a modern world, everybody has to be able to do those," she said, sitting in the airy art room after a morning of sketching shoes and boots with the rest of the class.

The classes can provide steady motivation for an artist, said Iguptak.

"I guess it's very important to them because it keeps them away from welfare. We get a little bit of income."

The gallery focuses on hand-built ceramics and has become renowned worldwide for its work, Shirley said. Pieces reside in the National Gallery in Ottawa, the Museum of Inuit Art in Toronto and the Cerny Collection of Inuit Art in Bern, Switzerland, just to name a few.

Choosing to focus on hand-built ceramics as opposed to wheel-spun was a natural choice. A government-run ceramics program had shut down in Rankin Inlet in the 1970s, so there were already several artists skilled in the craft.

"The thing that Inuit bring to the table is their ability to manipulate materials," said Shirley.

"This is what's kept them alive over millennia in a difficult environment ... because they knew how to manipulate material. Hand-building is just a matter of manipulating material and putting some creative insight into it."