North End Gallery
Featuring Art created in Canada's "north end"



Yukon Posters
Sculpture Jewellery Ceramics Crafts
Contact North End Gallery

This page provides a small sample of the wide variety of quality works of art that's home to the North End Gallery.

Sculpture
Baskets
Birch Bark Biting
Moose and Caribou Hair Tuftings
Woodwork
Moose Antler Art
Pottery
Jewellery
Inuit Sculpture


North End Gallery offers sculptures by local artists who use a wide variety of northern materials including naturally shed caribou and moose antler, muskox horn and mammoth ivory.

Price range $175 to $595.

Maureen Morris; caribou and moose antler carvings.


Chuck Buchanan; muskox horn.
approx. 3"x7"x10" ht.

 

 

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The women of Fort Liard, Northwest Territories, have been making and using birchbark baskets for centuries. After the labour intensive harvesting of the bark, each basket is meticulously crafted and requires many hours to fold, shape, and stitch together with spruce root and sinew. The porcupine quill work is the most difficult and time-consuming part of making a basket. After the quills have been sorted by size, cleaned, and dyed different colours, they are softened in warm water just before sewn into unique designs on the basket.

Traditionally, the light-weight but sturdy birchbark baskets were used for cooking, picking berries, storing tools and food, and carrying water. Today, these baskets are valued around the world as an art form.

North End Gallery has selected an outstanding assortment of quill-worked birchbark baskets in a wide variety of shapes and sizes. Each basket is signed by the artist.

Price range $50 to $295.

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Birch Bark Biting is a traditional Cree art. It is done by carefully separating thin pieces of birch bark. When you get a piece of bark, you fold it two or more times. You place the bark between your teeth imagining what you are going to bite; flowers, leaves or insects. You begin biting while rotating it with your fingers. The end result is a unique design.

All Birch Bark Bitings are framed in a manner which effectively highlights and protects the artwork.

Price range $125 to $195.

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Tufting with the hair of moose and caribou is a traditional form of art used by the Athapaskans to adorn clothing, and special items such as bags and belts. Our tuftings are made by Gladys Lavallee, Our tuftings are available framed using mattings and wood moulds designed to compliment the artwork. They are also available unframed.

Price range $185 to $325.

 


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Burl jewellery boxes inlayed with semi-precious stones and placer gold by Stuart Simpson & Christine Kelly.

North End Gallery features woodwork creations fashioned from local poplar burls. A burl is a large outgrowth on a tree, mainly found where trees grow in a "stressful environment" characterized by disease, bugs, or extreme cold. Poplar burls are prized by woodworkers for the beautiful grain features revealed within the wood, and their irregular shapes.

Whitehorse artist Andrew Finton is well known for transforming burls into oil lamps and bowls.

Price range $55 to $175.

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Over a period of twenty five years, Len Masse has adapted various techniques and combined them within this truly unique art form. After preparing the surface of the moose antler, he uses pen and ink to do the outline and fill work, etching to portray detail of fur and feather, and surface work to apply colour or solid black. While the pieces have a resemblance to scrimshaw and the etching technique has been adapted from this art form, this is not true scrimshaw as other techniques are used.

All works by Len Masse have been matted and framed by his wife Mary-Beth

Price range $95 - $495.

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North End Gallery carries a variety of wheel-thrown, kiln fired pottery by several artists.

Price range $29 to $139.

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Gold Nugget - Our natural gold nugget jewellery is hand-crafted by Jana Bidrman, whose family mines Scroggie Creek near Dawson City. The purity averages 90% gold plus 9.5% silver – one of the highest in the entire Yukon.

Price range $65 to $1500.


 

Mammoth Ivory - the woolly mammoths roamed the Yukon more than 10,000 years ago. Their tusks have been preserved in permafrost and unearthed from ancient river beds by present day mining operations in search for Klondike Gold.

 

 

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All our sculptures are made by Inuit carvers living in the NWT and Nunavut, using natural stone quarried throughout Arctic Canada. A certificate of authenticity accompanies each work.

Price range $85 to $2500.

 

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