My journey of arts started when I was little, in after class lessons of ceramics in primary school. The attraction to clay followed me all the way throughout the years of National M. K. Ciurlionis School of arts and led me to a wonderful ceramics teacher. She unlocked the doors of the Japanese ceramics, the aesthetics and the philosophy. Since then Japanese ceramics plays a special part in the way I treat clay, the way I understand ceramics, and experience it. After art school I continued studying sculpture in Vilnius academy of arts. I was working on conceptual side of art, the installation of art in space and relation between the aesthetics and the ethics in art. Even though it was light-years away from making ceramics, the experience there enriched my practice with clay.
Few years of focusing on site-specific installations eventually led to a tiny ceramics studio in a corner of nowhere in Lithuania with Japanese ceramicist Noe Kuremoto. Love for ceramics grew. Love for Japanese ceramics grew. Love for connection between clay and nature grew. I’m choosing ceramics as my occupation, profession and craft because I find so much beauty in the process of making it. I mean the magic of taking a soft material straight out of the Earth and revealing practically useful and aesthetically beautiful piece of art out of it. I also find beauty in the tradition of ceramics. The art of ceramics has been with mankind since prehistoric times. The ceramics carry the story of old civilizations and history of human culture. I want to carry the tradition of handmade ceramics. I want to keep the connection between man and nature through everyday use of functional handmade ceramics.
In the ceramics I create you won’t see shiny glazes, shapes pushed to the limit, loud décor. I’m not trying to invent anything new. What I’m focusing on is the whole journey of ceramics, from the stone, to the cup. The clay essentially is an old and tired rock that comes back into its primary shape once it’s fired. The time and fire transform it. By transforming they leave marks of history, marks of great force that land on the surface of the cup. I want to treat the clay with respect. I want to respect the time that made the clay, the fire that turned it back into stone and treat the finished ceramic piece as a part of nature. I choose earth-like shapes, earth-like colors as if bringing back the piece of clay to where it belongs. Through making ceramics I’m experiencing nature, I’m speaking to nature and I’m working together with it.
