A red hat topped with a curved horn lies on a desk at Porthmeor Studios in Cornwall, south-west England, where Sámi artist Outi Pieski has a residency. When I visit, she is preparing to display a series of similar hats — known as a ládjogahpir, a vital symbol of the Sámi people with a tumultuous past — around the corner at Tate St Ives, as part of her first major UK show.
The ládjogahpir is at the centre of Pieski’s research project with archaeologist Eeva-Kristiina Nylander. A deep dive into the object’s history reveals that it was commonly worn by Sámi women until the 1870s, when Christian pietistic priests banned them because they associated horns with the devil — part of a wider erasure of Indigenous culture caused by Scandinavian encroachment into the Arctic region known as Sápmi.
Since then, the hat has often been seen encased behind glass in institutions around the world: from the National Museum of Finland in Helsinki to the British Museum in London. “I want to question why the visual traditions of my ancestors are situated in ethnographic museums, while western visual traditions are in art museums,” Pieski says of the project.
In recent years some significant collections of items belonging to the Sámi people have been rehoused in their place of origin, including at the Sámi Museum Siida, in the Finnish village of Inari, where Pieski served as artistic director for its permanent exhibition These Lands Are Our Children. Highlighting the importance of this process of return, the artist describes the hat-making workshops she has conducted to bring Sámi women together to share their skills and stories and make simpler versions of the hat.
“It’s a safe space to talk about difficult topics, such as gender justice and the impact of colonialism,” she says. As we sit in disarming cosiness by a crackling wood burner, she describes this process of restitution as “rematriation”, which “starts where repatriation doesn’t reach”. “It’s bringing a gendered perspective to Sámi history, and bringing ancestral knowledge back into people’s lives.”
The questions of value, ownership and cultural identity raised by the ládjogahpir and its peripatetic existence are ones that often preoccupy Pieski. Her profile has grown in recent years: she has exhibited at galleries around the world and is working on public art projects for buildings in Norway and Finland. Residencies are rare for her, though. “I don’t like to travel: the best situation is that my works go around, but I stay at home,” she laughs.
This is understandable: in Ohcejohka (Utsjoki in Finnish), one of the northernmost parts of Finland, she is surrounded by the culture and natural terrain — forests, mountains, rivers and valleys — that inspires her work. The rugged landscapes she paints reflect the language of wilderness, of unowned or unoccupied land, that’s often used to justify colonial endeavours, but her finely crafted interventions — the traditional textile-knotting techniques that embellish these works on canvas — are a mark of the depth of culture that is often embedded in places that are labelled as uninhabited.
She moved to Sápmi after graduating from the Finnish Academy of Fine Arts in Helsinki in 2000, in an effort to reconnect with her ancestral homeland, hoping to do so by standing outdoors and painting nature directly. At university, she had been immersed in the doctrines of the western contemporary art canon but, before that, duodji (a Sámi word loosely translated as “craft”) had always been part of her upbringing — both her grandmothers made clothing and her father was skilled at carpentry. As a result, “Using your hands has always been a natural way for expressing yourself in my family.”
She did learn craft skills, but it was a while before she embraced this heritage as part of her professional practice and to question the influences of her university education. “It took time for me to accept myself the way I am,” she says. “My natural way is that I love to work with detail: the world speaks to me through the details.”
Though Pieski has since moved into sculpture, installation, research-based projects, photography and printing-making, duodji is a theme across her work. “It’s a holistic concept that combines Sámi visual creativity and traditional skills, as well as our philosophy, worldview and spirituality,” she says. As with the ládjogahpir, these traditional practices were suppressed as part of 19th-century efforts to “civilise” the Indigenous populations of the region — through her art, Pieski is showcasing these creative and spiritual traditions and raising questions about traditional knowledge and those people’s rights.
When I visited her in St Ives on a misty Thursday in January, one such work was in progress: hanging from the high ceilings was a cascading installation of tasselled components, inspired by the trimmings of traditional Sámi shawls. The interplay of dark and pastel shades is inspired by the contrasts seen in the winter in Sápmi, when night breaks only briefly each day to give way to a gentle light.
At the Tate show she plans to place this new work in conversation with a similar piece (“Guržot ja guovssat/Spell on You!”, 2020) to create an immersive experience. “These installations are inspired by the gathering of Sámi people and how we can strengthen each other when we come together. We don’t have monumental structures visible in our lands — I see this as a nomadic monument.”
She crafts the individual knotted elements of these sculptures in collaboration with fellow makers in Sápmi — a “ritualistic act” of creating together that she sees as crucial to the work, similar to making tasselled shawls. “The bodily practice of doing things with your hands is like a prayer or sacrifice. When you give you time and energy to make clothing for other persons, it’s an act of love and very important.”
While activism is inherent in Pieski’s art, she thinks artistic contributions to the discourse around the rights of Indigenous communities have their own distinct role in the process of change. “It’s important to have many tools: we need to have hard political agendas, but we also need to talk about deeper experiences — such as what it’s like to be in and live in the land.”
The rights of Indigenous communities are on the global agenda today as never before — which has, among other things, given artists such as Pieski a profile boost. She sees strength in allying with people experiencing similar struggles in other parts of the world, and in sharing strategies to fight back. “It is even more important that we work inside our community: my work is made for my people, and I want it to bring them strength, power, energy and healing. We have the right to live our own lives.”
To May 6, tate.org.uk. Outi Pieski will be speaking about Indigenous art at Tate Modern in London on April 28