The artist Britta Marakatt-Labba was born into a family of reindeer herders in Sápmi, one of the northernmost regions of the world and home to the Sámi Indigenous community. For over four decades, her artistic practice has yoked methods of visual storytelling to the Sámi people and the Nordic landscape, which she has achieved with touching works that alternate between history and the present. Marakatt-Labba is known for her embroidery work, for which she threads fine wool, silk, and linen onto white fabric grounds, as well as for prints, illustrations, scenic designs, and costumes produced for film and theatre. The new embroideries Milky Way and In the Footsteps of the Stars (both 2021) are composed as if the landscapes they contain were refracted through an orb or reflected in an eye, suggesting the parabolic projections used to create two-dimensional maps. Within the landscapes delineated by their borders are images of flora, fauna, stars, and figures wearing red ladjogáhpir (or horn hats), a particular Sámi women’s hat that is topped by a curved wooden horn covered with embroidered fabric. Sámi cultural history is bridged with the present through Marakatt-Labba’s characteristic iconographic hybridity.
Madeline Weisburg
