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!
