artist statement

The ongoing focus of Reda Grigaraviciute’s practice examines our relationship with nature: an interrelation that profoundly affects our contemporary culture and emotional well-being. Often incorporating female figures and natural elements, through combinations of figuration and abstraction, her work explores pressing social and ecological issues of our current climate: our place in the Anthropocene, as well as the representation of the female body in the art world. Working closely with materials, including oil paint, raw pigments, and ceramics, is essential in reinforcing the connection between the individual and non-human world. This laborious process of hand-crafting also enforces a deceleration, with a view to approaching the act of creation more mindfully, in addition to providing gratification for the inner desire to arouse sensory aspects beyond merely the visual. 

Reda Grigaraviciute brings a combination of psychological and emotional force as well as a physical, tactile connection to genres of figurative and sculptural art. Her works, such as Accountability (2020), Hortus No.202 (2020-21), aspire to transfer a sense of the melancholic state of mind and tend to be retained by a self-contained, representational space, devoid of classical symbolism. This interpretative openness encourages the spectator to explore the artist’s compressed, immense emotional capital, charged with ambiguity.

Her aim is to create art that explores this ambiguity and illuminates the paradoxes between stillness and chaos that arise from engagement with city life and nature. In her works, she questions the essence of being a human, accompanied by speechless plants in an urban space. As both a long-term resident of hectic, metropolitan environments and a lover of nature, Grigaraviciute experiences a quandary of feeling: a despondency toward the lack of verdure in a town, along with the lack of liveliness in the countryside; and translates this ambivalence throughout her works. To her, nature is an essential place to regain inner balance and rediscover an authenticity of meaning in beauty and life. Yet, she acknowledges her own position within the Anthropocene epoch and is urged to evoke a sense of accountability for humanity’s selfish actions towards the environment and its attempts to exert control over nature.  

The passion of philosophical enquiry inherent to such themes is immanent in the scheme of her work, and as such, her compositions are invariably imbued with a sense of psychical connection. The fluidity of visible brushstrokes on the canvas, and apparent physical force in her ceramic work, emphasize the simulated intimacy of the scene depicted within already complex narratives about connection and perception. By leaving traces of process as an invitation to the audience, she invites them to pause, observe surroundings in-depth, explore the space we inhabit, and allow feelings to communicate.