Tia Keobounpheng (b. 1977) is an interdisciplinary artist whose practice weaves together geometry, abstraction, color, and fiber. Informed by her Finnish and Sámi heritage, her work navigates themes of identity and belonging.
Keobounpheng’s intricately layered compositions emerge through a meticulous process of measuring, drafting, drilling, coloring, and threading. Each piece becomes a tactile meditation on memory, both ancestral and cellular, while also being rooted in a long tradition of women’s embodied labor. Keobounpheng develops a multi-layered visual language grounded in geometry, not as a rigid system, but as a fluid, symbolic framework. Recurring motifs such as circles, curves, and radiating lines evoke natural rhythms and cycles, offering perspectives on transformation and continuity.
At its core, Keobounpheng’s practice offers a richly textured inquiry into ancestral inheritance. Through abstract form, she embeds processes of reconciliation and hopeful imagination, creating work that invites viewers to engage with the layered complexities of selfhood, memory, and the unseen forces that shape human experience.
Keobounpheng has received numerous grants from the MN State Arts Board, the McKnight Foundation through the Metropolitan Regional Arts Council, and the American Scandinavian Foundation. She has exhibited nationally, including a solo exhibition, Revealing Threads, at the Minneapolis Institute of Art (2023), Common Threads at Apple Park in Cupertino, CA (2024), Nordic Echoes at Scandinavia House in Manhattan, NY (2025). Her work is in the permanent collections of the Minneapolis Institute of Art, Minnesota Museum of American Art, North Dakota Museum of Art, and University of St. Thomas in St. Paul, MN.
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“Geo means earth, so geometry is just measuring the earth.” These words, heard attending my son’s 4th grade math lesson during pandemic distance learning, changed my worldview and reminded me that underneath rigid linear laws, an entire foundation of forgotten circular-consciousness exists. My exploration into geometry coincided with learning that in my known familial histories there was suppressed Sámi lineage in my great-grandmother’s line, thereby completely changing the narrative of our Finnish heritage.
Abstraction allows me to face my own entanglement with inherited patterns by placing them into an ancestral context that circles the past, present, and future together. My practice of creating modern paintings – tapestries of threads over drawings on wood – draws on the culmination of my skills in painting, drawing, color-theory, weaving, architecture, design, metalworking, sculpture and traditional handcraft.
I work entirely by hand, by choice. I am physically building auric warp-fields by channeling multiple patterns, threads, and colors that appear to shift and vibrate. Mapping geometries in pencil on wood, drilling holes, applying colored-pencil, and moving needle and thread back and forth, is a somatic method of recalibrating emotional, cognitive, and visceral ways of knowing. This practice of “unweaving” is a simultaneous upheaval of horizontal weft and exposing of vertical warp – like removing learned behaviors in order to see the threads of time and lineage that shaped them.
Geometry is a visual language that speaks universally and stretches the world through an expansive, interconnected lens. Unlike imposed orders that require conformity, geometry is tolerant and reflective of the natural order, and a cipher for differentiating colonial from indigenous ways of thinking and knowing. I use geometry to express epigenetic consciousness awakened by my ongoing reconnection and inquiry into Sámi lineage, land, and living relatives in Swedish-Sápmi – connections that were concealed almost to the point of erasure.
PORTRAIT BY: Wolfskull Creative