Outi Pieski: Beavvit-Rising Together (2019)

Born in Helsinki, Finland, Outi Pieski is a member of the Sami people who inhabit the Sapmi region within the current geo-political boundaries of Finland, Denmark, Norway and Russia. She studied painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Helsinki where she received an MFA in 2000. Over the years her interests have broadened to include collage and installations. The natural surroundings of her northern homeland are often the subject of her art, and she pays homage to the Sami people through her use of traditional crafting methods and materials. Her work has been shown throughout Scandinavia, Europe and North America in both group and solo exhibitions and she has been commissioned to produce several pieces of public art within the Sapmi region. In recent years she has received both the Fine Arts Academy of Finland Award but the Finnish Cultural Foundation Grand Prize.

In 2017, when Pieski received the prestigious prize of the Fine Arts Academy because, the jury explained that she has the “remarkable skill to create a unique exhibition...which will invite people to immerse themselves into a special world shaped by her.” Included in the resulting Academy-sponsored show, was the installation Beavvit-Rising Together which, like several of her other pieces uses thread and steel to recreate the Sami shawl-crafting technique called duojiwhich traditionally employs leather, roots and wool. Pieski’s website explains that the name for the piece, beavvi, means “many good friends” in the Northern Sami language. It is also similar to the word beaivi which means “the sun” from which the colors of this installation are derived making it an obvious candidate for inclusion in this exhibit that focuses on the varying ways vivid colors are used by contemporary Indigenous artists.

(This piece is proposed for inclusion in A Splash of Local Color: Vibrant Hues at Work in Contemporary Indigenous Art.)

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