How can you keep an Indigenous cultural tradition alive in the rushing roaring modern world? How about by turning it into wallpaper? That’s what Outi Pieski does in a work that humorously restages Andy Warhol’s pop art cow wallpaper, except the repeated image here is of a woman wearing a ládjogahpir, a hat that was once part of the dress of Sámi women in northern Finland and Norway. It is red, warm, with a horn or crown on top that’s the shape of an upturned shoe. The young women wearing this ancestral headgear with pride are part of a whole series of Arctic pop art works in which Pieski resurrects the ládjogahpir and makes it visible again.
She photographs the bright caps by themselves, in pairs, and being worn. This part of her entrancing exhibition at Tate St Ives is set up, ironically, like a fashion store. It is the closest her work comes to the consumerist urban norms of 21st-century Europe. Her heart, however, is in the mountains and ice fields of the far north, in another time stream, where landscapes are alive and forests have eyes. She sees that world with the passion of a campaigner and the vision of a remarkable artist.
