Suvinai was born in Cape Dorset in August, 1961. She is the daughter of Kiuga Ashoona and Sorosilutu, both well known for their contributions to the arts in Cape Dorset.
Suvinai began drawing in 1995. She works with pen and ink, coloured pencils and markers and her sensibility for the landscape around the community of Cape Dorset is particularly impressive. Her work is very personal and often meticulously detailed.
Suvinai’s work was first included in the Cape Dorset annual print collection in 1997, with two small dry-point etchings entitled Interior (1997-33) and Settlement (1997-34). Suvinai’s work has attracted the attention of several notable private galleries, as well as public institutions. She was featured along with her aunt, Napachie Pootoogook, and her grandmother, the late Pitseolak Ashoona, in the McMichael Canadian Collection’s 1999 exhibition entitled “Three Women, Three Generations.” Since then, she has become a committed and prolific graphic artist, working daily in the Kinngait Studios. In this annual collection of 2007, Suvinai is represented by two lithographs. Her work is often printed in the lithography studio because the medium so well represents the artist’s hand on the plate. Totally absorbed in the process, Suvinai worked for hours on the fine and precise detail of the pattern of rocks and minutiae in her “Tide Pool”, and the straw-like nest in “Hatched”. For Suvinai, the egg is a symbol of the creative process; in this case, released.
