True North: Published March 2000 in 64 Magazine

Judy Burch radiates a friendly, talkative warmth, yet the subject of her storytelling is five days north of her comfortable home in Richmond's West End. Her house, parts of which double as a gallery, is filled with hundreds of pieces of arctic art, each with a strange beauty that speak as of long nights, cold, vast distances and a hunter's living partnership with animals I know only through National Geographic and PBS.
Every object has a story. She touches them lightly as she talks, the way one would finger the beads of a rosary during prayer. "This is a piece that's very special to me." She rests her hand on a sculpture in her front room. A group of faces is encircled by arms incised into dark, heavy basalt, a fine-grained rock. "The artist, Lucy Tasseor, usually depicts the sense of wrapping her arms around family, the importance of family." The sculpture was inspired by a period of starvation suffered by Tasseor's community during the 1930s at Arviat on Hudson Bay. For some unknown reason, the caribou changed their path of migration. "She told me, through an interpreter, that to watch the face of a child starving is nothing. It's the face of the mother watching the child starve that you never forget."
Burch is a world-class expert on her subject, yet she's so high up in the game that only she and a handful of others could pronounce on the fact. She curates shows at the Canadian Embassy, lectures at the Smithsonian and gets speaking invitations from as far away as India. But the stories transcend the resume. Bright-eyed, tirelessly enthusiastic, she moves among her pieces, opening window after window into the profoundly different world that is the arctic.
"We were having tea and caribou sandwiches at the foot of this iceberg." She touches a framed photograph, one of many that complement the art. A man with a Skidoo and komitek, or sled, is dwarfed by a looming wall of turquoise ice. The picture was taken near the northern edge of Baffin Island, during Burch's first visit above the arctic circle.
"Sheatie, the hunter who took me out on the land, saw these objects off in the distance - they looked like wolves." The pair made a quick exit. Frightening the creatures, which turned out to be runaway sled dogs. "They are actually worse than wolves, wolves won't come at you. But I thought, if this is the end, how much better to die being eaten by whatever those creatures are than to have an automobile accident or cancer. How much more interesting for my children to tell their children someday."




	TRUE NORTH: Frozen Land, Fiery Spirit *By Ben Cleary with photography by Todd Wright for 64 Magazine.* Judy Burch radiates a friendly, talkative warmth, yet the subject of her storytelling is five days north of her comfortable home in Richmond's West End. Her house, parts of which double as a gallery, is filled with hundreds of pieces of arctic art, each with a strange beauty that speak as of long nights, cold, vast distances and a hunter's living partnership with animals I know only through National Geographic and PBS. Every object has a story. She touches them lightly as she talks, the way one would finger the beads of a rosary during prayer. "This is a piece that's very special to me." She rests her hand on a sculpture in her front room. A group of faces is encircled by arms incised into dark, heavy basalt, a fine-grained rock. "The artist, Lucy Tasseor, usually depicts the sense of wrapping her arms around family, the importance of family." The sculpture was inspired by a period of starvation suffered by Tasseor's community during the 1930s at Arviat on Hudson Bay. For some unknown reason, the caribou changed their path of migration. "She told me, through an interpreter, that to watch the face of a child starving is nothing. It's the face of the mother watching the child starve that you never forget." Burch is a world-class expert on her subject, yet she's so high up in the game that only she and a handful of others could pronounce on the fact. She curates shows at the Canadian Embassy, lectures at the Smithsonian and gets speaking invitations from as far away as India. But the stories transcend the resume. Bright-eyed, tirelessly enthusiastic, she moves among her pieces, opening window after window into the profoundly different world that is the arctic. "We were having tea and caribou sandwiches at the foot of this iceberg." She touches a framed photograph, one of many that complement the art. A man with a Skidoo and komitek, or sled, is dwarfed by a looming wall of turquoise ice. The picture was taken near the northern edge of Baffin Island, during Burch's first visit above the arctic circle. "Sheatie, the hunter who took me out on the land, saw these objects off in the distance - they looked like wolves." The pair made a quick exit. Frightening the creatures, which turned out to be runaway sled dogs. "They are actually worse than wolves, wolves won't come at you. But I thought, if this is the end, how much better to die being eaten by whatever those creatures are than to have an automobile accident or cancer. How much more interesting for my children to tell their children someday."
			Later, the sixty-two-year-old Burch related an actual bout with endometrial cancer just before Christmas, 1998. A problem during surgery resulted in "a near-death experience. I thought, at the time - it was a very peaceful thing - this is going to be very tough on my family, number one. And number two, I think I have more to do for the Inuit people." Burch travels to the arctic several times a year for sessions with Inuit artists sponsored by the various provinces of the far north. She's the only one called upon to do this. Because of the remote location, the artists receive little feedback from the dealers and collectors who purchase their work. "I tell them to do the best they can for the bread-and-butter pieces, but save time out to do ones that have spirit in them that comes from within, one-of-a-kind pieces that sing." Sales from her two galleries- she maintains another in Kingsburg, Nova Scotia - seem almost incidental to her other efforts, though last December as notable for the purchase of a $20,000 sculpture by a collector in Denver. The piece is at the high end of Burch's price range. Some of the smaller sculptures start at $150. Burch is choosy about whom she sells to. She's turned down collectors she thought didn't have the proper attitude toward the art. "The piece that went out to Denver is a museum piece. It needs to be thought out where it's going." Not only now, but later.

		"The pieces will outlive the people." The impossible-to-categorize Burch has been a Junior Leaguer and a prison volunteer. Early forays into a non-suburban lifestyle involved keeping goats, chickens and a goose in the backyard. She creatively opposed the regimen of Saturday morning cartoons by hiring an artist to give drawing lessons to her own and neighborhood children. Twenty years ago, the family bought a vacation home in the small fishing village of Stonehurst, Nova Scotia. "We wanted our children to know that there was a world out there that was not necessarily a home like this. And we wanted them to know that the most important thing they could do as to find the best in everyone around them. We were very involved with the families. Once, when someone was sick, they said he held on until we got up there." A few years later, she saw Inuit art for the first time at a nearby gallery. Something clicked with an artistic sensibility that had been refined by 15 years as a docent at the Virginia Museum. The idea of becoming a dealer started to take shape. But at that point, "I knew nothing at all about the arctic." On a trip to Montreal, she heard of an expert in Ottawa, three hours away. Burch phoned Maria von Finckenstein, now curator of Inuit Art at Ottawa's Museum of Civilization. The enthused Burch had to have a face-to-face meeting. Taken aback, von Finckenstein responded, "But there's a blizzard!" Burch replied, "It doesn't matter, I have four wheel drive!" In Ottawa, Burch told von Finckenstein she wanted to go to the arctic, "I could see that the relationship of the people to the land is what I was seeing in this art. I told her, ' I need to go to there. What am I going to do about it?' She said' We'll write you a grant.' I said, 'That's for kids.' She said, No! That was in February and I was in the arctic in May." She admits that her family was horrified. "But it was a wonderful experience and by me being by myself it was the best -- because I was not a threat to anyone and fit right in with people." The people and the land. "The north has an incredible magnetic pull -- everyone who's been up there feels it. It makes you realize how insignificant you are. I remember sitting on a little hill in Baker Lake, looking out and not seeing a living soul." Flashing back to when she used to train docents in Hindu at the Virginia Museum, she concludes: "It made me realize that we really are just a blink of Brahma's eyelid." Burch is occasionally able to bring artists to Richmond. Kananginak Pootoogook -- the names sound like cubes falling out of an icemaker -- came in the 1980s. "He got out of the car and he didn't look at the house, the neighborhood, anything else -- he looked straight up at the sky to see where he was in relation to the Pleiades. Then he asked the interpreter if he could come in and call his wife and tell her that." "In our culture it's 'How do you harness nature?' Up there it's such an incredibly strong force that the idea of harnessing it would be absurd. It's 'How can you live with nature and make it work with you.?' It's the same with the animals, a whole different approach." The most spooky and intriguing of Burch's pieces are inspired by shamanism. Some capture the transitional stage as a person is turning into a bird or a bear. Burch is matter-of-fact about this, mentioning casually that this or that artist saw his grandfather turn into a seal. "Part of the reason that you would turn into an animal is so that you would have the intelligence to think like an animal when you're out hunting." "These are basically stone age people where brought into the nuclear age overnight without anyone asking if they wanted to come. I talked to someone who said, 'Do you realize that 40 years ago I was living in an igloo and now I have e-mail?'" Another artist, Kenojuak Ashevak, visited in 1990. "It was in November. She sat out on my deck and the leaves that were falling were scary to her. Of course, she lives above the tree line. We cooked a big chuck roast, I wanted something that would be meaty and the kind of food that she was used to. There was this great chattering back and forth between the interpreter and Kenojuak. I finally turned to Jimmy, the interpreter, and said, 'What are you talking about?' And he said, 'Well, she thinks it's grizzly. I know it's polar.' They had no concept of cow -- "What's a cow?"
Inuit Prints & Drawings / Bone Sculpture / Stone Sculpture / Textiles / Contact Judith Burch / Home Arctic Inuit Art, 86 Mosher Road, RR#1 Kingsburg, Nova Scotia, Canada B0J 2X0 Toll free: 1-888-766-0777 Fax: (902) 766-4099