This is the story of a harpoon, how it became a pencil, and with it, everything else. Arvo Leo has centred his film Fish Plane, Heart Clock (2014) on the Inuit artist Pudlo Pudlat (1916-1992), positioning Pudlat’s pencil as a fulcrum around which a much wider context accumulates.

Originally living as a hunter on Baffin Island in the Canadian Arctic, an injury caused Pudlat to move to Kinngait, a colonial hamlet. In 1956, the Department of Northern Affairs and Natural Resources Canada established Kinngait Studios, which provided space, materials and instruction in drawing and printmaking for Inuit. The West Baffin Eskimo Co-operative was formed in 1959 to promote sales and exhibitions of Inuit art in southern Canada and abroad. Pudlat’s imagery reflects his ever-changing environment, combining animals or igloos with aeroplanes or helicopters, and often transforming one into the other.
Working prolifically in the Studio, Pudlat’s prints and sculptures have been widely distributed by the Cooperative. Yet in Fish Plane, Heart Clock, Leo focuses on Pudlat’s collection of over 4000 drawings and paintings, the most private part of an artistic output spanning four decades. The music played by Cape Dorset residents adds another layer, and is as present as the image.
Fish Plane, Heart Clock is more demonstrative and lyrical than documentary or neutral, as Leo interprets Pudlat’s artistic logic and his visionary form of graphic oration. Leo sees his film as an attempt not to talk ‘about’ Pudlat, but to talk ‘close to’ Pudlat. In other words, the proximity he offers is a seat at the centre of an orbit, from which an unprecedented collection of art and a constellation of cultural, economic and political relationships are highlighted.

Chris Fitzpatrick & Post Brothers