Food for thought, food for contemplation and food as a substitute for home.

Fall: the season of longing for comfort and warmth any way you can get it. Movies, sweaters, hot chocolate, art—the list is endless. If you’re looking for a place to yearn for whatever you know as ‘home,’ you might want to pop into the Remai Modern sometime before October 12 so you can check out Tarralik Duffy’s latest installment at the museum: Klik My Heels. 

While she now lives in Saskatoon, Duffy originally hails from Salliq (Coral Harbour), Nunavut, and pays homage to her home up North throughout her work. The award-winning artist, jeweller and writer has travelled across the country exhibiting and selling her work, starting conversations about commercialism, colonial influences on contemporary Inuit culture and the importance of skepticism. She uses a mix of mediums across her works, highlighting her skilled craftsmanship through her soft sculptures and digital drawings displayed in the current installation. 

Duffy has reflected upon the importance of food as sustenance and how it facilitates relationships with culture throughout her career. Just as food is central to life, it is central to her work. She often focuses on how colonial imports influenced Inuit households in the shape of canned goods, spices, teas, and flour, changing their communities’ way of life, little by little. Her work draws from multiple inspirations—her own lived experiences, her heritage and popular culture. 

She allows her audience to draw their own connections, underscoring the way the same mass-produced products have become integral to both communities and how consumer culture has evolved. 

Klik My Heels is Duffy’s first solo exhibition. She utilizes a Pop Art style similar to 20th century American artists Roy Lichtenstein and Andy Warhol, as well as clever wordplay and vibrant colours to draw in her audience. At the same time, she keeps a critical perspective on her topic of choice, emphasizing her undying dedication to storytelling as an Indigenous artist. 

Just as the audience may notice a consistent theme of anti-consumerism in many of Duffy’s works, she notices how consumer culture has influenced the very nature of Inuit—and more broadly Indigenous—ways of life. One of the more familiar images in Duffy’s exhibit is a digital image of Robin Hood Flour. The iconic yellow bag is depicted with the word “Palaugaaq” (Inuktitut for “bannock”) plastered across it instead of “All Purpose”. 

Wheat flour has a very intricate history with the Inuit people. It was introduced to them during a time of displacement and disenfranchisement from their land and food resources by European colonizers. After the passing of several generations, it eventually became a staple in the form of Palaugaaq, a food shared across Indigenous communities all the way from the Prairies to the Arctic. As shown by Duffy’s illustration, Palaugaaq now acts as an emblem of cultural resilience, symbolizing the Inuit community’s ability to adapt—transforming a foreign ingredient into a food of connection, continuity and survival. 

Klik My Heels draws parallels between the challenges her community deals with on a daily basis in the Arctic and her life here in Saskatoon. Despite the distance between Saskatoon and her hometown, Duffy builds her own bridges to connect them.

Her work commemorates both her love for her home and her sense of humour. Like her other works, she displayed thought-provoking images in a way that shows she loves to have fun and not take herself too seriously. While it may delve into a more reflective topic, Klik My Heels is a visually appealing and light-hearted exhibit, chock-full of funny little cultural references.

The installment’s title, Klik My Heels, is a clever play on words. Klik comes from the name of a luncheon meat Duffy grew up eating, whose likeness she has immortalized in a large soft sculpture. My Heels is a reference to the iconic ruby slippers from The Wizard of Oz, which in Duffy’s installation take the form of red, leather kamiik ( “boots” in Inuktitut). The kamiik were crafted by Duffy as an homage to the red leather heels she saw her mother wearing when she was young, her father’s kaamik and the kaamik of her loved ones up North. 

Klik My Heels truly draws from the old adage that distance makes the heart grow fonder. Her work is a love letter to her home and her childhood. While Duffy is critical of the way capitalism has pervaded mainstream Indigenous culture, she looks fondly on the staples that have sustained her and her family throughout her life. She draws influence from all the things and people she loves, displaying them largely, boldly and brightly for all to see in her work. 

Each piece in the installation reflects the beauty of everyday life and a part of Duffy’s journey from Salliq to Saskatoon. They weave together her personal history and a collective narrative familiar to all Indigenous people, regardless of geography, invoking feelings of nostalgia, longing, homesickness and, in the same breath, cynicism. 

It’s a feeling that many emerging adults can understand in this day and age—especially as we learn more about the historical context upon which modern institutions are built. Nostalgia and longing for the place you grew up in, mixed with criticism for the outdated systems that are still in place and the history behind them. Can you really be nostalgic for something that significantly impacted the health of your community? Can you long for a bread that your ancestors paid for in blood? 

Duffy’s work is poignant and thought-provoking—underneath the obvious explanation of distance for homesickness, blame can also be dealt to change. As you grow, watching your home evolve in tandem with you, you can’t help but long for what once was. 

Speaking from my own experience, it has been bittersweet to watch Saskatoon grow and change over the course of my life. Through innovation and outside inspiration, it has slowly begun to change into a metropolitan (or as close to metropolitan as you can get in Saskatchewan) hub for all prairie-dwellers eager for opportunities. While I am beyond thrilled to see my home evolve, it comes at the cost of the place I grew up in. But I suppose that is the nature of all societies—as time passes, every aspect of the world changes. It is our duty to remember and adapt along with it. 

Whether you’re homesick for a place thousands of kilometres away or simply reminiscing about your past, be sure to check out Duffy’s installation while it’s still being shown at the Remai.