O-4675

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sculpture

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Killer Whale

Sculpture – Killer Whale

Kwakwaka’wakw artist Gordon Twance carved this orca out of a single piece of cedar in the 1960s. Twance fashioned the orca’s snout in a hawk-like beak and tipped the creature’s tail with a humanoid head. Intertwining the features of different animals in this way has long been associated with the artistic traditions of the Pacific Northwest. This mixed iconography is meant to evoke the interconnections between land, sea and sky.

Gordon Twance

Gordon Twance is a wood carver and jewelry designer from the Kwakwaka’wakw territory in and around Fort Rupert, near the north end of Vancouver Island. In the mid-1990s, Twance lived and worked at Port Hardy, where he created and sold silver jewelry and cedar carvings. Several signed but undated carved cedar plaques indicate that he may also have spent some time in Surrey, British Columbia. His work features animals found in the Pacific Northwest.