Baffin Bay (Not for Sale)

This is a stylized carving of a Humpback Whale, carved from Serpentine, a very hard soapstone that I collected on a hiking trip to Baffin Island in the Canadian Arctic. This is really my first major Inuit carving. Note the acordian-like area under the whale’s chin and neck. It functions like acordian bellows, when opened, small marine animals are drawn into the whale’s mouth, after swallowing, the acordian is flexed, the baleen mouthparts close, and the water is expelled from the blow hole. The oak base was rescued from a discarded oak skid that stone was shipped to my home on..