Inuk Barbie Designs

Barbara P. Akoak
Barbara Akoak’s work carries themes often drawn from her Inuit ancestry, she depicts ancient tools, local animals such as the polar-bear, owl, caribou and the seal. Her choice of materials are ivory, baleen, musk-ox horn, feathers, beads, precious and semi-precious stones, pearls, silver, copper, brass and Dick’s gold. Barbara has been greatly influence by her extended family and especially her mother, Annie Akoak. Barbara’s extended family and immediate family would help each other prepare for a hunting trip, harvest local plants, cut up meat and cure furs, pluck birds and cook with each other. Annie taught Barbara how to sew, do patches, doll clothes when she was 6 years old, and Barbara would watch her do many sewing techniques. When Barbara was living in Halifax, NS in 2012 she learned how to do beadwork from her friend Killa Atencio of Mi’kmaq ancestry. From then Barbara decided jewelry was her passion and she decided to enroll into the Nunatta Arctic College’s Fine Arts program, Jewelry and Metalwork. Barbara believes working manually and creatively is a way to pass messages, make statements or get her ideas to become something tangible. Not many people get the opportunity to travel to Canada’s Arctic, and to be able to spread traditional Inuit knowledge through her arts is a way of spreading a part of her history as a modern day Inuk. Her practices started off from sewing, curing fur, and drawing then she later took on beadwork, and now she mainly works with metal and natural products.