Tia Keobounpheng is a Minnesota-based artist who is informed by historic, ancestral, and epigenetic perspectives as she reconciles an absent narrative in her lineage. Reconnection to suppressed Sámi lines, ancestral land, and living-relatives in Swedish-Sápmi, is processed somatically into mixed-media tapestries of threads over drawings on wood. Her method is rooted in and disconnected from traditional techniques in a way that echoes her own relationship with the culture that’s been buried in her blood memory for generations. 

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 “Geo means earth, so geometry is just measuring the earth.” These words, heard attending my son’s 4th grade math lesson during pandemic distance learning, changed my worldview and reminded me that underneath rigid linear laws, an entire foundation of forgotten circular-consciousness exists. My exploration into geometry coincided with learning that in my known familial histories there was suppressed Sámi lineage in my great-grandmother’s line, thereby completely changing the narrative of our Finnish heritage. 

Abstraction allows me to face my own entanglement with inherited patterns by placing them into an ancestral context that circles the past, present, and future together. My practice of creating modern paintings – tapestries of threads over drawings on wood  – draws on the culmination of my skills in painting, drawing, color-theory, weaving, architecture, design, metalworking, sculpture and traditional handcraft. 

I work entirely by hand, by choice.  I am physically building auric warp-fields by  channeling multiple patterns, threads, and colors that appear to shift and vibrate. Mapping geometries in pencil on wood, drilling holes, applying colored-pencil, and moving needle and thread back and forth, is a somatic method of recalibrating emotional, cognitive, and visceral ways of knowing. This practice of “unweaving” is a simultaneous upheaval of horizontal weft and exposing of vertical warp – like removing learned behaviors in order to see the threads of time and lineage that shaped them. 

Geometry is a visual language that speaks universally and stretches the world through an expansive, interconnected lens. Unlike imposed orders that require conformity, geometry is tolerant and reflective of the natural order, and a cipher for differentiating colonial from indigenous ways of thinking and knowing.  I use geometry to express epigenetic consciousness awakened by my ongoing reconnection and inquiry into Sámi lineage, land, and living relatives in Swedish-Sápmi – connections that were concealed almost to the point of erasure.

PORTRAIT BY: Wolfskull Creative