Masks – Sleeping Memory

With this work, I hope to open a space for reflection on how little we still know about our relationship with nature — and so these pieces of jewellery become a kind of question and suggestion. One may perceive the motif of a mask within them, which in many traditions is associated with connections to ancestors, deities, and the forces of nature. Amber itself, valued since ancient times not only for its beauty but also for its mystical power, continues to have these associations widely promoted today by amber traders.
In this series, amber is not the dominant element but an organically integrated part that reinforces the material coherence of the whole and the jewellery's subtle connection to nature and culture. Dark amber combined with moss seems to preserve a sleeping nature, while its cylindrical forms hang from dried sphagnum moss, whose free movement appears to awaken distant memories. The dried sphagnum moss was found inside the log walls of my house during reconstruction, it is part of an old traditional method of home insulation. The copper chain interprets forms characteristic of twentieth-century Lithuanian amber jewellery design. In contrast, the elastic hair tie, manufactured through contemporary industrial technologies, deliberately anchors the work in the present. Chosen as a bridge between inherited traditions and contemporary everyday life, its elasticity suggests adaptability, while its constant tension reflects the unresolved relationship between nature and modern consumer society.
At the same time, the chain becomes a reference to the construction of amber as a symbol of national identity — how this material was romanticized, embedded in the cultural imagination, and transformed into a signifier of "Lithuanianness.