Photo by Tia Keobounpheng
lost-threads
As a high school exchange student in Finland in the mid-1990s, Tia Keobounpheng learned how to weave. “I spent one day in a community weaving center with two old Finnish ladies,” she remembers. “I didn’t understand a thing they were saying, but we spent hours on looms, each of us weaving our own piece.”
Little did she know, more than 25 years later, it would be the siren pulling her attention from designing jewelry under the label Silvercocoon back to the art of weaving. “I realized, at 40, that experience of sitting with those two old ladies was essentially like sitting with grandmothers and doing handwork,” says Keobounpheng, whose father, David Salmela, is a highly regarded Duluth-based architect of Finnish descent. “The experience made weaving extremely emotional and tied it to an aching void within me of not knowing either of my grandmothers, who both died within a year of my birth.”
Those feelings are just the tip of the iceberg in what Keobounpheng describes as a “midlife deep dive” reaching into the past that is reflected in her exhibition Revealing Threads, the latest in the Minnesota Artists Exhibition Program at the Minneapolis Institute of Art, opening July 22. “What lessons are hidden in these threads from my ancestors that are still hidden within me?” she asks.
Part of the answer, explored in her “unweavings,” follows her solo travels through Finland, Sweden, and Norway, which introduced her to new relatives and to her ancestors’ presence in the Gällivare Samesläkter, a regional Sámi genealogy book that complements Swedish colonial church records. (The Sámi are the only recognized Indigenous people within the European Union.) “Finding my ancestors in this book confirms Sámi lineage in the way that is recognized by the Sámi in Sápmi, but what that even means is very complicated,” Keobounpheng says. “I am a white American reconciling myself as someone who grew up ‘100 percent Finnish’—now realizing the history behind the label was sometimes an assimilating cover-up for people who were Sámi.”
Through her research and art, she works to put aspects of her lived experience into a new, more complicated context—historically and responsibly—to practice seeing conflicting forces and allowing them to coexist in the collective present. “In that regard,” she says, “these threads can speak to anyone.”
Photo by Pat Barry
geometry-art
Artist Tia Keobounpheng uses geometry, she describes, “to express this emotional negotiation within myself.” The art above from a 2022 gallery show, is representative of her work.
