Eglė Čėjauskaitė-Gintalė – poet of the authentic past

I’m afraid of the dark and of sleeping alone. I’m even more afraid of the dark in a country house, because you can’t see the lights of the other flats outside the windows, and of spending the night alone. Because for me, a five-storey baby, there is nothing lonelier than a hut in a forest, by a spruce tree, surrounded by darkness on all sides. And it doesn’t help that you’re not usually alone in such a hut: birds rattling on the roof, pulling lichen from the shingles, foxes or cats scurrying around, mice in the basement, surely, waiting for the night to come to check for crumbs on the table. And it’s scary when the walls start to creak. But that’s just me ; there are people who are happy to go back to their huts in the woods, who know that mice, foxes and cats have their place in the infrastructure of the home and of nature, and who recognise and lovingly embrace all the rustles and crunches of home. Even those in the walls and frames, the authorship of the bark beetles.

Eglė Čėjauskaitė-Gintalė (Lithuania) is a poet of the authentic past, of the search for roots and memories, who manages to transfer the warmth of the past year into jewellery and finds it in completely unromantic places. In wooden frames, where the bark beetles have inexorably worked their magic. That insect graphic, the low relief, is almost unchanged, transferred to the pin, pressed onto the greyish plate, and it seems as if nothing more is needed – the bark beetles are the authors of the work. However, the amber droplet, a vertical stick, echoing the relief created by nature, is barely visible. If you notice it, fine, if you don’t, you don’t need to. You can barely see the curves and furrows, you can barely see the amber and the bone, you can barely hear the crackling of the bark beetles in a time long gone.

The artist says:

In my childhood home, I used to hear strange creaking noises coming from the doorframe. At first, it was uncomfortable, but then I looked forward to the sound, and it became my own, tame. When I came back from my studies, I found the door frame carved by bark beetles. I wanted to immortalise their patterns as inseparable inhabitants of my home.