About this work
The eye enters this painting through a press of living forest, only to find something staring back. *Zunoqua of the Cat Village* centres on a totem figure representing the female ogre Dzunukwa — known as the "wild woman of the woods," a thief of children but also capable of bestowing wealth upon the Kwakwaka'wakw peoples.
The totem figure gazes to the left rather than directly toward the viewer , an avoidance that feels deliberate and unsettling. Scattered among the swirling vegetation are many cats, which appear equally menacing.
The vegetation around the totem has transformed into viscous waves, swirling around the hillside and the base of the figure , while the colours are muted — deep greens and grey-browns pressing close on all sides, the palette restrained yet tense. The whole painting carries a monumental appearance, an elegiac gravity typical of Carr's mature approach to First Nations motifs.
Painted in 1931 in oil on canvas, the work now resides in the Vancouver Art Gallery.
It belongs to the period following her 1927 breakthrough — a mature phase in which she produced the work that would earn her national and international recognition.
As Carr returned to visit villages in Haida Gwaii that she had last seen around 1912, she found profound changes: the suppression of the potlatch system, the clear-cutting of the forest. These later paintings carry that grief — a mourning for the disappearing people, a pervasive sorrow for what was rapidly being lost.
The painting captures the tensions of colonization in British Columbia while expressing Carr's genuine interest in the ethnographic preservation of First Nations culture.
Carr herself wrote that she found these figures terrifying in their expression of power and domination — and that dread, held in respectful awe rather than spectacle, charges every brushstroke.
This is a painting for rooms that can hold a degree of mystery — a study lined with dark wood, a hallway that needs an anchor, a living space where contemplation is welcome. Carr, a solitary figure for most of her life, seemed to relate to Zunoqua , and that identification lends the work a psychological intimacy unusual for a painting of this scale and subject. It speaks to the viewer drawn to art that operates on multiple registers at once: as image, as history, as encounter with something older and wilder than the wall it hangs on.
