Drawn territory

            What had previously been designated as Sámi territory became known, in the first half of the 1970s, as Sápmi, a modern term and catchphrase for the borderless Sámi region, which spans four countries. Up until this point, Sámi art had – to put it simply – primarily been art in small scale. It was the art of objects carried on and with oneself; clothing, knives, cups, vessels, leather tools, textiles, wood and horns elaborately decorated, ornamented and marked. Throughout the 1970s, a shift took place on multiple levels. Art originally dedicated to a familiar circle was introduced to a larger audience, and the Sámi house marks, muorramearkkat, which used to mark the ownership of things, now marked the entirety of the vast Sápmi region. Áillohaš, like the other Sámi artists that establish themselves in the 1970s, stands on the shoulders of the 20th Century pioneers in Sámi visual arts and handicrafts, duodji, not to mention the many who sewed, embroidered, applied, braided, wove, twisted, coiled, hewed, notched, sawed, whittled, felted, and scribed as a part of their daily tasks.

            In the corridors of the health center in Kárásjohka/Karasjok hang four paintings, three of them side by side as a triptych. They are from 1987, early in Áillohaš’s new period in which he painted large, bold-colored acrylic compositions. The paintings are more scintillating than his earlier or later works, with more layers, painstaking details, and color combinations. The gestures of a quivering hand remain the same. The summer night light and winter twilight are represented, of course, as are the mountain landscape and deep lakes, and there are multiple perspectives and compositional layers across the three cohesive canvases.

            I can see glimpses of Áillohaš’s predecessors in these paintings; Nils N. Skum’s landscapes, Johan Turi’s reindeer, and Iver Jåks’ dancing bodies, but also the thoroughness of craftmanship and the precise scribing of the duodji masters such as Jon P. Fankki, Per Hætta and Lars Pirak. And yet, there is a new level here, a new temperature. The stylized figures we recognize from drums and rock art occur as if in a new aggregate state and are actualized, almost singing, into this blue-red-yellow-green space. The paintings are like tablets, or icons, bearing unreadable script. But for the initiated, they are precise descriptions of correlations between history, the spirit world, and the now. And in their now, Sápmi, the Sámi space, has become habitable and safe. A Sámi nation can be spoken of. These notes go unexplained, but it is an apparent manifestation of a history and a people’s right to their history. This manifestation is solidified with figurative language as well as an intensity, a spirituality, almost in the form of an official declaration: “We exist and have existed. We were here before the colonizers from the south. We have a history. In spite of the fact that so much has been taken from us and so much has been destroyed, this has been written in stone.” Rock art carvings of dancing, drumming peoples near the sea in Alta are 3,800 year-old blessings from our ancestors.

            Indeed, Áillohaš must have felt called, elected, willing, and ready. He appears to have had another and larger project than us other artists, a project concerning time, place, consciousness, and planning. Áillohaš becomes the premier artist of the new Sápmi, endowing his people with common images and colors, just as the petroglyphs in Alta must have appeared to him as a vision of the lost Sámi society. There, the life-giving Sun radiates through people and landscapes, connecting us with the heavenly spheres and subterranean lakes, animals, gods, and spiritual beings. With alters and rhythmic dancers as intermediaries.

            These paintings act as new atlases and maps. The new-rock-carvings both depict and actualize this geography, and help to redefine and liberate the very bedrock itself. It is Sámi imagery which redefines and puts ethnic colors to the rock art and the bare-rock face at Alta which is listed as a World Heritage site. The series of paintings from the end of the 1980s and onward also acts as weapon and shield in a new arsenal of Sámi art. The paintings ally the Sámis with other indigenous peoples throughout the world, with the San peoples’ cave drawings of hunting scenes at the Cape of Good Hope, with the handprints of Fuegians on the cliff walls at Bahia Yendegaia, Magallanes, and those of the Aborigine peoples in Gariwerd, Victoria.