Tia Keobounpheng is an American artist informed by historic, ancestral, and epigenetic perspectives, who translates her personal reconciliation of an absent narrative in her lineage into complex, geometric, and abstract threads over drawings on wood. Reconnection to suppressed Sámi bloodlines, ancestral land, and living-relatives in Swedish-Sápmi, is reflected as a technically skilled method that is as disconnected from traditional techniques as she has been from the culture that’s been buried in her blood memory for generations. 

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"My work emerges from a process of self-reckoning that places me and my ancestry in the context of time - considering epigenetics, colonization, and assimilation to Whiteness. As a descendant of Finnish and Sámi people I reconcile generational patterns that have kept me from seeing the ‘un-see-able.’ I use geometry to move my consciousness beyond binary narratives, in order to imagine a more complex framework of understanding. 

Conceptually, I unweave my identity and break apart the methods of traditional women’s work in order to present fiber as Abstract Art.  Working by hand shifts my brainwaves, mindset, and intentions in the direction of decolonization. Layers of symbolism hide in plain sight as my artifacts are both the ends and the means of transformation.

In weaving, strands of warp are wrapped in tension on a loom.  Single lines of weft weave over and under, perpendicular to the warp. In my process, I think of vertical warp threads as the foundation of time/lineage and horizontal weft as my learned behaviors. What perspectives can I gain by removing the weft? 

Doing so re-imagines the legacy of my ancestors by awakening wisdom lost to the forces of dominant culture. The threads do not conceal the drawings below. They attempt to reveal what's been hidden, what is still flowing through my body, what still could be.  I reconcile myself - with my ancestors and with my descendants - through multiplex works that speak about the power of color, fiber, geometry, and abstraction to ignite human energy capable of imagining a decolonized world.“

PORTRAIT BY: Wolfskull Creative