Chapter 22: "Birds Carry the Sun to Birdland"

Speaker 0 00:00:00 Chapter 22, birds Carry the Sun to Birdland. This chapter describes Birds carry the sun to Birdland by Lucy Kak, created in 1977 and measuring 38 by 47 centimeters. There is a tactile version of this drawing. It is labeled three. This chapter is one and a half minutes long. Speaker 1 00:00:24 In this work, the sun is depicted as a charmingly, irregular shaped orange circle, held a loft in a yellow, green sky by nine birds. The colors are done with crayon, but the sun's face is drawn in black ink, feminine eyes, encircled by eyelashes, gaze out at us and her mouth tilts to the right and a half smile. Her face has dotted lines across the cheeks, nose and forehead in familiar designs of Inuit women's tattoos. These black dotted lines also appear on the red, blue, green, and black birds. Can you feel the dotted patterns on the tactile version? Tattoos were opposed by Christian missionaries in the North for hundreds of years. Something that Kim Awa, who lived between 1915 and 1982 would've experienced. They have had a revival recently, however, with many young Inuit women learning the techniques and designs of their ancestors, the directions of the birds pointing east, west, and north create a symmetry to the drawings and the black dots create kinship between the foul and their precious cargo. Speaker 0 00:01:34 Please move to the next stop along the wall for three and a half meters and turn to the left.