WEAVING PATTERNS FOR POETRY/lovatiesė* visual poetry series** (2023-ongoing)
a large volume of typewritten  visual poetry, varying sizes ; composed on a 1960s Smith-Corona typewriter with an original two colour ribbon (above you see a small selection of the images)    





WEAVING PATTERNS FOR POETRY/lovatiesė* contemplates the ideas of authenticity, continuity, and the notion of otherness though visual and textual writing. It is inspired by the patterns of my family’s heirloom textiles, woven in a small village in South Lithuania. Composed on a typewriter, the visual poetry prints  illuminate the twilight space between innovation and tradition, authenticity and copy, home and other. Using typewriting as a metaphor for weaving, and weaving as a metaphor for writing and speaking, I navigate between mythopoetics of today and the past, between the English and the Lithuanian, between text and textile.
Those typewritten poems became the foundation for many of subsequent books.






***...

to write
translates as rašyti into Lithuanian; rašyti, in turn, translates as to write or to inscribe a pattern in English. The process of weaving typically involved resistance to innovation. It involved replicating making practices from one generation into the next, reinforcing continuity of a group’s identity, reinforcing stability through uniformity and conformity. Writing does not originate in the lyric voice, but in the act of marking and making.

Poetry and textile practice are both rooted in long traditions of making. Weaving depended on repetition, sequence, line, patience, discipline. Poetry too — despite the contemporary search for originality, despite Eugen Gomringer’s or Anthony Etherin’s innovations — maintains inherited structures of rhythm, constraint, composition practices, line, sequencing. Each of those traditions have kept their own narrative and defiance against change.

lovatiesė is a reciprocal process of reinvention between bedspreads and writing, exploring the notions of resistance, authenticity and continuity through experiments in visual poetry, based on the traditional South Lithuanian textiles which I inherited from my great aunt. I use typewriter as printmaking tool, exploring “typing” as a metaphor for weaving and “weaving” as a metaphor for writing and speaking, composing my books and prints as a hybrid score between the visual and the verbal, the verbal and the aural, the aural and the auratic, the auratic and the material.

Therefore, authenticity is not a feature residing in the preservation of the material qualities or in the continued repetition of composition methods. It is an aura generated through migration of traditions into new materials, technologies, reading conditions. Continuity resides in contemporary reinterpretations and reinventions that resonate with current cultural contexts. National culture is not a museum artefact to be preserved behind the glass in its eternally unchanging face. Like language, national culture is alive when it is in use; when designs can be perrašyti/rewritten through contemporary practices rooted in citation, appropriation, copying, reproduction, which have been central to visual arts for decades, including my own.

Rašyti, after all, is an active act of creation.

* lovatiesė means bedspread in Lithuanian.
*** Rauda is a type of Lithuanian lament, which exists somewhere between song and poetry. It is improvisatory, composed of a few motives that women repeat with variations.

**SOME BOOKS FROM THE SERIES:

Rauda*** (a weaving pattern) available HERE

MORE WEAVING PATTERNS FOR POETRY available HERE

WEAVING PATTERNS FOR POETRY
No. 18 of the TYPEWRITTEN series by PSW gallery.
This book contains 6 typewritten visual poems inspired by Lithuanian textile patterns.
Printed on an old Gestetner 320 mimeograph. Hand-bound edition of 60 copies, 62 pages, 28x21cm landscape size.
The TYPEWRITTEN series is edited, printed, hand-bound and published by psw.
Available PSW webshop.

**SOLO SHOWS FROM THE SERIES:

LOVATIESĖ solo exhibition at MEWS LuxLake, Chengdu, China, March 28 - May 26, 2024

LOVATIESĖ solo exhibtion with abC at Quanyechang Cultural Arts Center,Beijing, China, June 10-18, 2024

WEAVING PATTERNS FOR POETRY | WEBMUSTER FüR POESIE |POEZIJOS RAšTAI solo exhibition. GALERIE DRUCH UND BUCH, Vienna, Austria, Oct 3-31, 2024..