Imagine growing up with just your grandmother in an Arctic wilderness so isolated you didn't actually know there was anyone else in the world.

This was the case for Irene Avalaaqiaq, the artist who created 'Woman Transforming', an Inuit tapestry that can be seen in the Bermuda National Gallery exhibition 'Cultural Reflections & Culture On Cloth' which opened on January 27 and is one of a number of winter exhibitions sponsored by Endurance.

This unique touring exhibition of more than 70 stone sculptures, prints and tapestries is drawn from the extensive collection of Inuit art at Dennos Museum Centre at Northwestern Michigan College (NMC) in Traverse City, Michigan along with wall hangings from the Judith Varney Burch collection of Arctic Inuit Art.

This week, Mrs. Burch, who lives in Nova Scotia, Canada, was on hand to give lectures and answer questions from gallery visitors.

Over a quick bagel and coffee she spoke with The Royal Gazette about her passion for Inuit art.

"I know a number of the artists, although many of them are now dead," she said. "This is an art form that younger people are not apt to do."

She said of artist Irene Avalaaqiaq's isolated childhood: "You live out there and there is no one around. There is no architecture. There are no trees. There is no anything. Her grandmother would go and hunt to bring in food and that is how they lived. Her grandmother would tell her all these stories. They didn't have a written tradition. So a lot of that is what she puts on cloth. When I told that story in India and China they were just staggered."

Many of her tapestries are done by artists from a tiny hamlet in Nunavut Territory, Canada called Baker Lake. It has a population of around 1,500 people and is located at the mouth of the Thelon River, toward the geographical centre of Canada.

Mrs. Burch's background is a combination of sociology and art. She has been a docent in several prestigious art museums including the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in Richmond, Virginia. She first started collecting Inuit art while living in Canada.

"We have a house in Nova Scotia," she said. "I was in Montreal looking at Inuit Art there trying to figure out what I thought. I made a phone call to someone who was head of the Inuit art section of the Bureau of Indian Affairs in Ottawa. Her name was Maria von Finckenstein. I said: 'are you there tomorrow?'. She said 'yes, but there's a blizzard'. I said: 'that doesn't matter'. Then she knew she was in trouble. It was amazing. I looked at the art. This was before it was given to the Museum of Civilisation in Quebec which has a major collection of Inuit Art. She ultimately became the Inuit curator. I looked at it all. This was all sculpture."

Mrs. Burch was fascinated by what she saw, especially the connection she saw between the people and their land reflected in their art. She decided that in order to collect and show it she needed to visit the people themselves. Mrs. Burch won a grant to spend six weeks touring the area, talking to people and learning about their art.

"It was an unbelievable experience," Mrs. Burch said. "I was able to connect with people. Travelling by myself made it wonderful, because I was able to go out and talk to women about child birth, about raising a family and things like that. I went out hunting caribou on the back of a skiddoo. A girl took me out on a three wheeler to see her mother and father who were living in their summer camp. It was like a wooden shack with a raised portion where they slept with a lower portion to cook on.

"Her mother said 'I have only trusted three other white people. Three of them were men. Now you're the fourth, so I want you to live here'. That is the most wonderful thing that anyone has ever said to me. It was terrific. The relationships I have had with the people have been spectacular."

She said that in Nunavut, people are connected to the land in ways that people in the Western world cannot understand.

"We are so controlling of everything," she said. "They live with the land, or they did more so in the past than now."

Mrs. Burch is a research collaborator for the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History. She has taken her art collection around the world, to Mexico, China, France, and Japan among many other places. Much of the travelling she does is for the Canadian embassy, to take Canadian culture around the world.

"It is just something I do to give back to Canada," she said. "They come down and take any art out and use it for exhibitions. I talk to anyone they want me to talk to. In Beijing, China, I started working with children and that was a phenomenal addition to it. It is just sharing cultures back and forth. I had a whole background in art, and on top of sociology it was an amazing connection. I am not an art historian, and I can't even sew buttons on. Plus I am an American, so I am in a peculiar position. It works though for some strange reason."

The tapestries are worth thousands of dollars, and she admits that sometimes she has trouble parting with some pieces that she sells through her art gallery in Nova Scotia.

"I have a few items that I sell," she said. "But sometimes it is difficult to let things go."

On April 1, 1999, Nunavut became a new Canadian territory which made the Inuits the largest landowners in North America. It has a population of around 29,500 spread over an area the size of Western Europe. Nunavut means "Our Land" in the Inuktitut language.

"Nunavut is very rich with resources and in terms of land it is huge," said Mrs. Burch. "It is wonderful."

However, she said the Arctic is really suffering from global warming.

"Climate change there is scary," she said.

"The ground is all permafrost. To build a house, you can't put a foundation in; you have to build it up. Now what is happening is the ground is disappearing. People's houses are floating off. It is very frightening. There are serious global warming problems with the flow edge.

"And that is where they go to get the bears and seals. The Hudson Bay used to be filled with ice packs and ice flows. Now it is hard to find them. So it is hugely different. I would love to put together an exhibition on global warming."

She said she is delighted to travel to places like Bermuda to help make people aware of the people of the Arctic.

"I insist that wherever I am that there is a big map that shows Ottawa, and Baker Lake," she said.

For more information about Mrs. Burch go to www.arcticinuitart.com or for more information on Baker Lake go to http://www.bakerlake.org/.

The exhibition at the Bermuda National Gallery is on until April.