Britta Marakatt‑Labba is a renowned Sámi artist whose work spans embroidery, beadwork, and textile art, offering a luminous and politically resonant vision of Sámi cosmology, history, and resistance. Her work, deeply embedded in the cultural traditions of the indigenous Sámi people of northern Scandinavia, blends meticulous handcraft with mythic storytelling. Among the many recurring motifs in her oeuvre, solar imagery holds a central place—both as a visual anchor and a metaphysical symbol. Through her use of beads and thread, Marakatt‑Labba weaves sun motifs into expansive tapestries that are as much about spiritual continuity and ancestral memory as they are about celestial beauty.
Born in 1951 in Idivuoma, a village in Sweden’s far north near the Norwegian border, Marakatt‑Labba was raised in a reindeer-herding family, surrounded by the rhythms and cosmology of Sámi life. This upbringing formed the foundation of her artistic voice, which speaks with eloquence and urgency about Sámi heritage, land, and sovereignty. Although she is most widely known for her embroidery—particularly the monumental piece Historjá, a 24-meter textile frieze chronicling Sámi history—her beaded works are equally profound, and their treatment of solar motifs is uniquely powerful. The sun, in Sámi cosmology, is not merely a celestial body but a sentient force, often personified and revered as a sustaining spirit tied to cycles of life, light, and rebirth.
In her beaded panels and integrated textile works, the sun often appears as a radiant disc composed of tiny glass beads, stitched with painstaking care into skins, cloth, or wool. These suns vary in tone depending on their narrative context—golden and vibrant in scenes of renewal, red or amber in tales of resistance, and dimmed or fractured in moments of mourning or ecological crisis. Each sun is not an abstract circle but a living entity, surrounded by rays that sometimes resemble tree branches, antlers, or radiating rivers, grounding the solar form in both cosmological and earthly registers. Her use of beads, with their glimmer and tactility, adds a dimensional quality that evokes the shimmer of sunlight on snow or the distant flicker of solar light during the long twilight of Arctic winter.
Marakatt‑Labba’s solar imagery draws heavily from traditional Sámi duodji, or craft, where sun symbols appear on drums, shamanic paraphernalia, clothing, and jewelry. The pre-Christian Sámi worldview, especially that preserved in oral traditions and drum iconography, often portrayed the sun as a mother figure or life-giver. In some shamanic systems, the sun journeyed across the sky during the day and through the underworld at night, ensuring balance between light and dark. Marakatt‑Labba integrates these ideas into her artwork by juxtaposing sun symbols with reindeer herds, joiking women, snow landscapes, or ancestral spirits. These juxtapositions do not flatten the sun into mere metaphor but restore its place as a dynamic agent in a living cosmology.
One beaded work, displayed as part of an exhibition on climate and indigenous identity, shows the sun suspended low over a melting tundra, its rays stitched in copper and gold beads that seem to drip downward like tears. Around it, beaded patterns suggest heatwaves and cracked earth, referencing the impact of global warming on Sámi lands and livelihoods. Another piece, more celebratory, portrays a solar deity encircled by dancing figures in gákti, traditional Sámi dress, their garments adorned with intricate beadwork reflecting traditional color codes of red, blue, green, and yellow. Here, the sun is both a witness and a participant in ritual, illuminating not only the dancers but the cultural knowledge they embody.
The precision of her beadwork amplifies the symbolism of light and life. Marakatt‑Labba often uses beads to highlight the transition between darkness and dawn, a metaphor particularly resonant in the Arctic, where the sun disappears entirely for months during the winter and then reemerges in slow, miraculous increments. Her suns are not uniform; they evolve across her body of work. In some pieces, the solar beadwork is dense and layered, recalling the sun’s strength during the midnight sun season. In others, it is sparse or fragmented, echoing the fragile appearance of light during the polar night. Through this modulation, she tells not only mythic stories but seasonal and ecological ones, embedding her art in the temporal rhythms of the far north.
Marakatt‑Labba’s solar motifs also carry political significance. The sun becomes a symbol of survival, of cultural resilience in the face of centuries of colonization, assimilation policies, and environmental dispossession. Her beadwork, often small in scale but monumental in implication, acts as a quiet assertion of presence. Each bead, applied slowly and deliberately, represents continuity—of knowledge, land, language, and identity. This painstaking method stands in contrast to the rapid erasure often inflicted on indigenous cultures, turning her art into a form of resistance through endurance and repetition.
Her works have been exhibited internationally in venues ranging from the Venice Biennale to Indigenous art summits in Canada and Scandinavia, but they remain deeply local in spirit. Marakatt‑Labba continues to live and work in the Sápmi region, drawing inspiration from the landscape and the stories passed down through generations. Her solar beadwork, though global in its visual appeal, is always anchored in the specifics of Sámi experience. It reflects a worldview in which the sun is not distant but near, not abstract but sacred, not fixed but in perpetual motion—just like the people who honor it.
In the hands of Britta Marakatt‑Labba, beadwork becomes not just a decorative craft, but a luminous script for remembering and reimagining. Her solar imagery, radiant and reverent, invites us to see the world through a Sámi lens—where the sun is a companion, the land is alive, and every stitch is a thread connecting past, present, and future. Through her mythic suns, she reminds us that art can be both a sanctuary and a torch, holding light in the darkness and guiding us back to what matters.