Britta Marakatt-Labba captures Sámi life in textiles

Based in northern Sweden, textile artist Britta Marakatt-Labba makes intricate embroideries about Sámi culture, history and mythology, drawing inspiration from her family’s everyday experiences, significant political events and concerns about the future of the Sápmi region.

‘I grew up around yarns and stitching, so my interest in embroidery started when I was very young. My older sister embroidered all the time, and I was fascinated by the needle going up and down. My father, who died when I was five, left behind some handcrafts. But they were both making traditional items, rather than artworks – embroidery on the surface of our clothing, for example. When I was young I visited Kiruna near where I live, and in the city hall I came across embroidered works by the Swedish artist Sten Kauppi (1922-2002), which were one of my first inspirations.

It wasn’t easy for me to make it as an artist, as someone from a reindeer-herding family. I found a college in Luleå, where I went for two years, before going to HDK-Valand, the academy of art and design at Gothenburg University, for four years to study textiles. I started embroidering in my final year, in 1978. Today, as well as stitching, I also work with appliqué and printing.

Storytelling was very important in my family. I knew I wanted to explore these narratives in textile, but I didn’t know how. Then suddenly, once when I was dyeing wool yarn, I thought: “Yes, I’ll do what painters do, but with dyed yarns on linen.” Since then I’ve been telling stories through pictures.

My work is about Sámi culture – our daily life, our history and our mythology, including the stories of our goddesses. I used to take a lot of photos, observing people working with reindeer or fetching water, and use these to depict my family and people from my village. I’m inspired by stories about our past – for example, the fact that, when the Christians first came to Sápmi they forbade women from wearing their traditional hats because they associated the horn in the middle with the devil. The women simply turned the horns backwards so the authorities wouldn’t see them and carried on wearing them.

When I was eight or nine, I said I wanted to do “something with sketching” when I was older. But I only started sketching out my designs in 1997, when I started making bigger works. I grew up looking at materials and immediately seeing what I was going to make, so it was natural to start building directly on the cloth. Now I only make sketches for my larger works.

My favourite piece is Garjját (The Crows), made in response to the Alta conflict in the 1970s and 80s. The Norwegian government wanted to build a hydroelectric power plant in the Alta River in northern Norway, which would involve erecting a dam that would put the Sámi village of Máze under water. The state sent hundreds of policemen to forcibly remove protesters and, as I saw them coming over the hill, they looked to me like crows – birds that also converge in one place and you can be sure that they will leave the area clean. I showed this piece in a festival in northern Norway in 1981, and it was really the start of my career.

I started making work about climate change in 2007. I learned from childhood not to take more than you need – don’t fish more or pick more berries than you have to – but today’s unpredictable weather is making it difficult for my family to carry on farming reindeer. There are also mining companies digging up our land in search of minerals. In one of my works [Nightmare, 1984] I depicted them as rats that have entered a tipi and are plotting in the kitchen area, a sacred place.

I work at home, in the house I’ve lived in since 1986, and I’m building a small gallery in my late mother-in-law’s house. If I had a studio elsewhere, I’d lose my grounding.

My main ambition, now that I am in my seventies, is for my eyes and fingers to stay healthy so I carry on working. I want to make bigger and bigger pieces – works spanning two metres long.’