Sacrificial Pillar II

Irene Snarby: 

I originally started with the woodcuts of Iver Jåks. But I quickly became fascinated by these sculptures and the installations because I understood nothing! 

Narrator: 

How should we interpret this sculpture by Iver Jåks? Irene Snarby, art historian and PhD student at the University of Tromsø, helps us see the stories that may lie behind the form. 

Irene Snarby: 

They are so cunningly made. The more you know about Sami culture, the more stories are woven into these works. I find that deeply fascinating. 

Narrator: 

Iver Jåks was born in 1932 in Karasjok. He was strongly inspired by Sami handicrafts, or duodji, and by Sami culture. 

And the title of this work, Sacrificial Pillar II, may point to the Sami tradition of seidier - sacred places. 

Irene Snarby: 

A seidi can be a landscape, and it can be a rock - a rock that stands out a little from the rest of the landscape. And one could say in a way, that it is an old Sami sacrificial place. 

The way Iver Jåks saw it, seidis and these places were actually passages into the spirit world. 

Narrator: 

People often sacrificed objects at the seidis. And on Jåk's sculpture there are several things that can be interpreted as offerings. A beautiful reindeer antler, a bear spear, and on the spear – two crosses framed by bands of twisted reindeer hide. 

Irene Snarby: 

And it makes the mind wander to the southern Sami sun crosses that used to be imprinted on the middle of the Sami drums that were banned in the 18th century. The missionaries came and collected them, and some people were even killed for owning these drums! But even so, when they were Christianizing the Sami people, the missionaries were unable to remove this sun cross, and it survived on objects as carvings and as a pattern on belts and mittens and other everyday items. 

The meaning of that sun sign is that the sun was the most important symbol in Sami mythology. So that's why it remains as a very strong symbol.