Tuesday, August 19, 2014

The Art of Recalling: Art Essay in New Issue of Feminist Studies

The most recent issue of the well-respected and long-lived journal Feminist Studies has just been published and my essay about the artists Emilie Demant Hatt and Johan Turi is included. "The Art of Recalling," illustrated by works in oil and on paper by Turi and Demant Hatt, considers the effect that Turi’s drawings for his book Muitalus samiid birra had on Demant Hatt’s own artistic career as an expressionist painter. 

I've been studying Demant Hatt's life and art a good long while, but it was only when I read Harald Gaski's insightful essay, More than Meets the Eye, a couple of years ago in Scandinavian Studies that I began thinking about the ways in which Demant Hatt and Turi had a reciprocal artist partnership as well as an ethnographic collaboration.

The designer has used the same painting of the ice bridge that the University of Wisconsin Press put on the cover of With the Lapps in the High Mountains: A Woman Among the Sami 1907-8, my translation of Demant Hatt's travel ethnography of her time in Lapland. The imagery of the reindeer going up the mountain  can now be compared with Turi's drawings inside, which also show simplified figures of reindeer ascending and descending the mountains.