This months guest blogger signing off

Neeta Jääskö är bosatt i Inari i Finland. Smyckeskonstnär som spränger gränserna mellan det traditionella och nytänkande inom samisk design. Följ hennes liv och tankar på bloggen under juli månad. _______________________________________________________________________________
at a loss

After the attacks in Oslo and Utøya it's been hard to think of something (anything!) to say. The trials, tribulations and small  victories in my life and workplace hardly seem to count for much when people's lives can so brutally be ripped apart, just like that. I will leave the actual political analysis to other for now, though, as the  ruins are still smoking - it's still too fresh in everyone's mind. This week has seen one of the quietest Mondays in my memory.

If anything good came out of this, it kind of shook me into appreciating life's urgency. It's being here now doing just this what counts. Knowing why you're here and where you want to go are  important, too, but sometimes right here right now is everything that counts. Running a business, one has to be able to plan ahead, at least on paper, for five or even ten years, with intent on making those  plans reality. That can sometimes seriously skew my perception of the  here and now and make me forget that I am and have to be alive now. What will happen in five years will happen, and there is a chance that whatever will happen will actually be better if I just take a few moments to appreciate where I am now and how nice it is here every day.

It has been like that this summer - I worry about the future so much that I forget how much I enjoy benchwork, the whole coming up with problems and getting to solutions process, whether it is for a repair or implementing a new design, even just the fact that I was able to  solder a broken hinge back together without having the solder run into the rivet and making the structure rigid. Hey, I never knew I could do  that - consider this one personal boundary pushed.

So one day later this week I sat down with only the vaguest idea of  what I wanted to do, waving away a million more pressing matters that  demanded my attention, and did something just for the hell of it. It  (a ring with only a slightly smaller decorative gold ring) turned out  to be both gorgeous and a bit revolting, as is my preference, and was soon followed by more variations on the theme. I've spent a few working days altogether working on them, and it feels good to do something NOT for a direct pay-off. There may be an indirect pay-off  later, but that has yet to transpire - the árbi2 collection reminds me again of what is really important to me, what keeps me interested, and what should really be the goal when I arrange my affairs. Just playing around, trying out an idea, and making it work.

I wanted to use gold instead of the more traditional gilt silver because the spirit of the time and the place in which this collection  is born is all about what is good, real and important, through and  through. Let the golden rings remind us all of the important things,  however small they may be, and be a roadmap of sorts. My bench may not 
change the world at large, but it can shape worlds on a more personal  scale, and it continues to enrich my world and life greatly.

I'm now a little more than two weeks shy of my 26th birthday, and the nights are getting darker even in Varangerbotn. This is my favourite  time of the year, and I look forward to going back to Finland and  maybe visiting the south - I miss the dark summer nights. Times of  transition, like now from summer to autumn, always inspire me. Soon it  will also be a full year since I landed in Inari wanting to work on  and in my business full time at last. It sure has been interesting so  far, and only time will tell what's next.

This concludes my guest-blogging month at Miessi, and it's been very interesting - also hard, because I haven't written on demand in almost  ten years, but rewarding - I may continue this in my own blog later  this year. Thank you for having me, and I hope whoever has been  reading these entries will find something that provokes a thought or 
otherwise resonates. If you wish to keep following my activities and  the odd daily thought, you can find me on Facebook  (www.facebook.com/neetainari) or Twitter (twitter.com/neetainari) -  drop by and say hi if the fancy takes you!

Signing off,
Neeta

Design Neeta Jääskö

Design Neeta Jääskö

Månadens gästbloggare om att följa sin dröm och leva i nuet

Neeta Jääskö är bosatt i Inari i Finland. Smyckeskonstnär som spränger gränserna mellan det traditionella och nytänkande inom samisk design. Följ hennes liv och tankar på bloggen under juli månad. _______________________________________________________________________________
Neeta: Last week's blog post comes in late on account of some extensive soul-searching I've been doing recently. I also have a job, which takes up some of the time I'd be happy to dedicate to blogging, but mre on that later. I have been making my five-year review, five years after things were set in motion.

I'm at the stage in my life when I've accomplished everything I wanted five or six years ago when I was fresh out of school with my matriculation exams behind me and few ideas of what to make of life. So I tried whatever came up, got into jewellery, got the training, and now I've got my own business and brand, and a pretty clear idea of that they're about. I got a load of other stuff in my personal life I  wanted as well, but that I will spare for a less public outlet.

I repeat, because this is very important: everything I dreamed of having in my life back then came true. EVERY SINGLE THING.

This wasn't a result of a rigorously planned and documented project with (or without) a timeline. I just realized upon reading old journal entries that the life I dreamd of living one day is here, I'm living it now, and expanded my observations from there. I knew what I wanted, and every week or at least every month I did something to make that happen, sometimes without even realizing. Every interesting-looking stone I bought "for later" was a baby step that led me here, and the stones have come in handy when I've been asked for something special.

I suppose when you know what you want, you will find a way to get it without even thinking about it that much. The unconscious part, though it's only the beginning, is crucial and it's about taking the baby steps so long that you eventually learn to walk, and the run. This is very encouraging in this time when I'm plagued by self-doubt and fear, 
although it doesn't make them go away. I still lie awake at night.

Anyway, it's easy to find or invent patterns in retrospect, when things that led to me being her have already happened, but future still eludes us all, no matter how many business plans we draw up or however much time we spend soul-searching or analyzing stock market development (did you know that on the day Osama bin Laden was 
murdered, the price of silver dropped? Fear not, it's back up and rising).

What the people who tell us to follow our dreams usually omit, either by mistake or intention, is that when it becomes real life, it ceases to be a dream. That is why it's so easy to miss the things about your everyday life that you only used to dream about in the past, and that can also bring about a feeling of emptiness. It does for me, anyway. I 
have or have had everything I desperately dreamed of a few years ago; and I can only think of what will I dream of now? If this is not "enough", what else do I really need? What do I want?

There is a lot of wisdom in seizing the moment, living in the eternal now and being happy just being who you are, where you are, doing whatever it is you're doing, but it can get stale and disintegrate into complacency, which, as you know, KILLS. I kid thee not. The 
forces that drive creativity, innovation, changes, reforms, are more often than not born out of wanting to be somewhere different, picturing that specific situation, and then starting to arrange one's world to bring about that preferred situation. Curiousity did NOT kill the cat.

Insisting upon following one's dreams entails a lot of hard work, sacrifice and discomfort, and doesn't suddenly transform one's life and make it better, least of all easier. Bad things will still happen and deadlines and irritating people in shop queues will still exist. 
But I know that the only way to get even close to true happiness and fulfillment is to at least try to pursue one's dreams - that way things will eventually fall into perspective, and the irritating  people won't matter so much.

It's quite late, verging on early next morning, and I will regret staying up. But I wanted to finish with this train of thought and wake up later this morning with a little bit clearer head of what actually needs to be done and what has got to go. Thursday evening I will take off to Inari, at long last, to visit my people and celebrate my grandmother's birthday. There will be business to take care of, but  I'm planning on having a one-day holiday, too, and finding some inspirational people to speak with! I like it how different the environment is here by the Barents Sea but I do miss my forests and  lakes, and the sea and the fells can get boring, too.

Ha en skön semester!

Lata dagar i hängmattan står högt på önskelistan just nu! Vi kommer att ha lite sommarledigt såklart, men nätbutiken rullar annars på i vanlig ordning men med något längre leveranstider.
Njut av den härliga sommaren!
Petra & Madeleine
PS. I nya numret av Lantliv kan du tävla om våra fina tennarmband i denim, design Sara Björne.

Månadens gästbloggare

Neeta Jääskö är bosatt i Inari i Finland. Smyckeskonstnär som spränger gränserna mellan det traditionella och nytänkande inom samisk design. Följ hennes liv och tankar på bloggen under juli månad. _______________________________________________________________________________

Neeta: tweet your revolution

<blockquote>"att ha på sig kolt/kofte - betyder det att man MÅSTE va beredd att informera? ka syns @gaski @susanneamalie & ni andra #lappish ?"  
(http://twitter.com/#!/ylvapavval/status/87277042990718976)</blockquote>

This tweet inspired both a conversation on Twitter and a lot of thoughts. I get into this conversation from time to time, and it's amazing that over the years almost everyone has also testified to feeling like whenever they wear the traditional dress, they get singled out to explain and inform what is it that they're wearing, and why. In settings with almost exclusively Saami presence and where there is a clear context, for instance the Saami films being featured in some film festival, it doesn't happen so frequently, but otherwise it often feels like wearing one's traditional garb gives one the duty of representing and educating the public at large.

Unfortunately, a majority of people living in Finland, Sweden, Norway or Russia are happily ignorant about the colonial baggage that we still carry. (I would venture a guess that a lot of Saami people are ignorant of this as well.) And the question "what's that dress and why do you wear it" is at first glance pretty benign, and when questioned, no one who asks that ever really means to offend or irritate. They're just curious, which is perfectly okay by itself. Their ignorance of the colonial baggage makes it impossible for them to realize HOW exactly is it wrong to demand to be informed. BUT. One would think that after centuries of overprivileged honky dudes travelling to Sápmi for research, writing endless titles on the Saami people, measuring our skulls, passing down our skeletons in pseudo-scientific circle jerks and having their grandchildren write up ludicrous "apologies" almost a full century after the fact, at least some of that accumulated knowledge would have penetrated the general consensus on things worth knowing about our country. But no. That knowledge is usually only dragged out in public discourse by oppressors when someone needs to "prove" that the Saami people of today are not "real" Saami, a tactic which is especially used on modern-day reindeer herders and in cases of land disputes.

To cut to the chase, I hereby posit that <em>the very act of demanding any member of a minority or an otherwise disenfranchised group to explain their perceived deviation from the norm and/or holding them accountable for, you know, BEING DIFFERENT, is a form of oppression</em>. In this case, a pretty spirit-dampening and insidious background-noise variety of oppression and passive aggression directed towards the Saami people.

More precisely, the endless, repetitive questioning is a tactic designed to defuse and derail discussions where actual issues pertaining to the oppressed group involved might conceiveably be tackled, which would be subversive and therefore perceived dangerous to the status quo. It helps to set key issues like the basic right to be able to use one's native language into a "special interests" category where they are subsequently easy to exoticize and trivialize. And while a lot of Saami people do benefit from exoticization, the net effect on the Saami peoples is generally negative.

Personally I'm getting to the point where I cannot be bothered to care any more that the public school systems are doing next to nothing to educate their own damn public about indigenous peoples and the issues involved in their own countries. That cannot be the job of any individual Saami person that happens to be present, either. The dress does NOT mean "ask me about your home country", and we DO have better things to do with our time and energy than to coddle the collective ignorance of the public. In this day and age, not learning it at school is about the stupidest excuse for continuing to be ignorant that I've heard, and believe me, I've heard some priceless excuses for acting stupid in my time. The language I use around this issue is harsh, and it may be easier for many to let micro-level oppression like this slide, but why put up with it if the net effect on both the individual and the collective are negative? It's time that grown-ups started doing their own research in their own time and taking their responsibilities as voters and citizens seriously, and give us some space to work on issues that actually matter to <em>us</em>. Pleading ignorance as a get-out-of-jail-for-free card works only once when a Google search of two or three words takes about five seconds to make, and siphoning the results takes about 15. Is that really such a stretch?

To balance the social commentary with a heartwarming artistic anecdote, I am busy working on the Fall/Winter '11 collections for men and women. I've been thinking black, geometric, with dashes of colour  and brightness, and the feedback I've received on some prototypes has been (funnily enough) along the lines of "these forms are too strict and controlled!" I like to surprise, and especially now that I work so extensively with organic forms and serendipitous design solutions, it's been good to work within right angles, constricted frames and a controlled process.

It's almost summer in Varangerbotn as well, and I'm preparing to spend some quality Friday evening time on the porch. Who knows, maybe a  revolution could begin!

This month guest blogger Neeta Jääskö

Hello world, and many thanks to Miessi Design for inviting me to blog here! My name is Neeta Jääskö, I'm from Inari in the Finnish portion of Sápmi and I currently reside in Varangerbotn, Norway. I started running my own jewellery business in September 2010. I first got to try making jewellery in 2004, and by 2005 I knew that that was exactly what I wanted to do for a living. Right from the start I wanted to work in my own studio on my own brand instead of working for others, which itself is great and a salaried bench job is not to be sneezed at in this economy, but it never felt truly satisfying and I knew I couldn't do it in the long run. 

I got drawn into jewellery and metalworking because I was bad at it at first. Every time you start something new, you are not going to know anything about it and the first attempts will very likely be rubbish. Same with metal. It challenged me right from the start, which was fascinating. I had so many ideas that I wanted to work on within jewellery and the more I tried, the more loudly I got the message that I could just stick my ideas where the sun doesn't shine if I couldn't be bothered to learn how to work my medium. I decided to learn. 

With learning comes the literal broadening of one's mind. I wouldn't necessarily say that I'm good at jewellery now: I just suck a little less and have become more articulate and efficient in applying the skills that I have to get the results I want. It has been a steep learning curve, and entrepreneurship adds an extra layer of difficulty. Training in Southern Finland away from familiar places and faces was a bit hard for me at times, but it did give me an incentive to start exploring my own heritage, culture, and ideas. After all, the ones surrounding me in Lahti were not *mine* and I didn't have much towork with in them. Also the values of Finnish goldsmith training were occasionally incompatible with the ones I grew up with, and it was hard to reconcile them at times. 

But the thing is that if I'd stayed in Inari and trained there, I wouldn't have half the ideas and the drive to work on my jewellery than I do now. I had to start anew in so many ways. I moved in together with my then-boyfriend and started building a new circle of friends, found a whole new network of part-time jobs that would support me through the studies, learned to deal with whackjobs telling me to "FUCK OFF YOU FUCKING GYPSY!" (seriously!) ... I knew I wouldn't stay so I just gritted my teeth through most of the parts I couldn't really accept, and while making committments of any kind with that sort of attitude is nearly impossible, I came back from my excursion with that which I went looking for: perspective, experience, new skills, good friends and fond memories. And boy was I glad to be back home in September! 

It was a time of uncertainty and discomfort, and to a point, discomfort is the key to creativity. Creativity itself is an essential part of the human condition, but if you only do what you're comfortable with and avoid newness and the unknown, you won't be able to trigger broadening and creativity from the within, either. Comfort and convenience dam the creative spirit and thus disconnect the person from the foundations of his or her humanity. Not everyone will be a great artist or writer or craftsman etc, but no-one should have to suffer that sort of disconnection, either. We're all good at something and we all have some thing that we're passionate about, and none of it is trivial or not valuable, ever. 

There is, however, a lot of pressure to erase our innate creativity in the everyday life. Institutionalised fine art and the focus on grand auteurs, the lifting of exceptional artists, inventors, thinkers and leaders on a pedestal above the rest of us, is but one of the ways by which the society works towards making "regular" people's creative exploits invisible or less valued - and by extension, making the very humanity of the so-called regular people invisible and less valued. 

The world is probably a better place for having a few Michelangelos in 
it, but what about the unnamed sculptors who had been working on religious art and architectural ornamentation for centuries, sometimes with the skills and vision to match Michelangelo's? The danger of lifting these famous names out of the history or our own day onto a pedestal is that it sets them fundamentally apart from the long tradition and lucky circumstance that produced these personae as we know them today, as if they were somehow developed in a cultural vacuum and just popped into existence with fully-fledged auteurness. They were definitely not conventional either on a personal or a professional level, which was important in the art department, but to be unconventional there have to be conventions to start with. Contradictions feed creativity in a million ways. 

We have strong traditions in the Saami culture(s) regarding art and craft. The most important of these is that these two are not mutually exclusive even after all the exposure to the mainstream Western art spectacle. In the recent decades we've seen the resurgence of duodji in both its traditional forms and as a way to express one's creativity in traditional techniques and materials, and both should be celebrated, lest we forget that a living culture cannot be just about either the individual or the tradition. Cultures and traditions are
created by people, after all, and the people in question are to an overwhelming degree products of their time and environment. 

Not every Saami person agrees with my personal working ethic, nor does everyone like the actual products. That is not the point, either. The point is creating variation and alternatives, which is groundwork for the living culture of tomorrow. As of the day of writing this, I'm proud and privileged for doing this work and being a member of a generation that has produced so many other talented young craftspeople with mad skillz and unique vision. Rock on!