Tia Keobounpheng realized to weave throughout a go to to Oulu, Finland, when she was 18 years previous. Seated beside two older Finnish ladies in a neighborhood weaving middle, she labored for hours, hardly talking a phrase. Twenty years later, following college research in weaving, structure, and design, the Minnesota-based artist’s reminiscence of her first lesson connects her to her ancestral land and its time-honored craft traditions.
On wooden panels, Keobounpheng weaves colourful threads to create exact geometries in vibrating colour. She says, “My exploration into geometry coincided with learning that in my known familial histories, there was a suppressed Sámi lineage through my great-grandmother’s line, thereby completely changing the narrative of our Finnish heritage.”
The Sámi folks of northern Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Russia’s Kola Peninsula are an Indigenous group with their very own distinctive languages and a standard, semi-nomadic livelihood that features practices like reindeer and sheep herding, coastal fishing, and fur trapping.
Traditionally, because the Scandinavians remained principally south and Sámi communities lived within the north, contact was unusual. However by the nineteenth century, Scandinavian governments started to claim sovereignty over the north, focusing on the Sámi, who have been more and more seen as “primitive” or “backward.” Their language was outlawed and lots of cultural customs suppressed as they have been compelled to assimilate into Scandinavian society.
Through the pandemic, Keobounpheng was serving to her son throughout a distance-learning 4th-grade geometry class, and a selected phrase caught her consideration. “Geo means earth, so geometry is just measuring the earth,” the instructor stated.
“These words… changed my worldview and reminded me that underneath rigid linear laws, an entire foundation of forgotten circular consciousness exists,” the artist says. “Aside from the powerful conceptual connections I was able to draw from geometry as a visual language to understand and express a circular, expansive worldview, the physical motions of spinning the compass awakened something deep within me.”
Keobounpheng’s compositions are each precise and interwoven, as shapes mix into different shapes, neither absolutely impartial nor merely an all-over sample. She describes the physicality of transferring a needle and thread forwards and backwards by means of paper or wooden as a method of metaphorically stitching this worldview into her muscle reminiscence.
The artist’s father was a self-trained architect, and from him, she adopted a modernist lens. “Robert Motherwell, Mark Rothko, and Josef and Anni Albers were early favorites of mine in my teen and young adult years,” she tells Colossal. “These days, Agnes Martin, Hilma af Klint, and Sámi artist Outi Pieski are my anchors of inspiration.”
Each bit requires preliminary planning to map the geometry, drill holes, choose the colour palette, and start threading a black-and-white framework. However typically, “all of my best intentions or visions for what the work will be start to loosen and sometimes fly away,” she says. “There is always a point, with every piece, where I must surrender my plan and give way to the threads.”
The artist’s work will probably be on view in Weinstein Hammons Gallery’s sales space at EXPO Chicago on the finish of April. She can be presently taking part in Nordic Echoes — Custom in Modern Artwork at Scandinavia Home, which runs from April 5 to August 2 in New York Metropolis and in addition consists of work by Sonja Peterson. Discover extra on Keobounpheng’s web site and Instagram.
