Postcards from Lithuania, plant ink, graphite, and pen on paper
Several years ago, during graduate school, a Black community organizer told us something I’ll never forget: she said she felt sorry for us white folks because when our ancestors immigrated to the US they gave up their diverse cultures to become part of the monolith of whiteness. That our connection to our ancestral ways of being was a very thin thread. My ancestry on my mother’s side is a mix, but all of my great grandparents on my father’s side immigrated from the Kaunas region of Lithuania. My grandparents were first generation Americans; they didn’t speak Lithuanian and, to my knowledge, didn’t retain any traditions from their parents’ home country.
Thirty years ago, I traveled with my father and sister to Lithuania. It was a newly independent country after nearly 50 years of Soviet occupation. We traveled around the country and had the opportunity to meet some of our cousins. In the last few years, I felt a yearning to go back. I started building out my family tree in Ancestry, learning more about my ancestors’ path to the United States, and finally figured out my real family name. It’s not Schultz (that’s what my grandfather’s name was changed to in the public schools), and it’s not even Sholis (an Americanized version that was written on my great grandfather’s gravestone). It’s most likely spelled either Siaulis or Siaulys.
At the same time, my residency reseach led me to the Kintai Arts Residency, located in the small town of Kintai on the Curonian Lagoon, the largest freshwater lagoon in Europe. The region is a biodiversity hotspot; in other words, a perfect place for me to do a residency.
Prior to arriving at Kintai, I traveled around Lithuania, starting in the capital of Vilnius. I reconnected with my cousins, who showed me some wonderful parts of the city and its environs. I was astonished by the amount of progress Lithuania had made in the 35 years since independence. Vilnius is a gorgeous historic city; it is now also host to dozens of contemporary public artworks, beautiful ecologically-aligned landscaping in its numerous parks, interesting contemporary architecture, electric ferries on the Neris River, which runs through the city, and a dynamic arts community.
A sobering but educational highlight of my time in Vilnius was a visit to the Museum of Occupations and Freedom Fights, located in the former KGB headquarters. I learned about the valiant effort Lithuanians made to preserve their language and culture when they were part of the Russian Empire, and their resistance movement against Soviet occupation. The maps and graphics and testimonials made tangible the collective trauma they experienced–many thousands of people forcibly relocated, jailed, disappeared, exiled, and killed. The Soviet occupation lasted from 1940 to 1991, only interrupted by four years of Nazi occupation, which resulted in 90% of the Jewish people in the country being murdered. This country has been through a lot, so their very visible solidarity with Ukraine makes sense. Not only do they have a parallel history, but as my cousin said, “if Putin succeeds in Ukraine, we’re next.”
From Vilnius, I traveled to Kaunas, where my family was from. I learned more about Lithuanian history during a walking audio tour focusing on the city’s architecture. Kaunas is a world heritage site, both for its old town, which dates from the 14th century, and its modernist architecture, built between the two world wars when Lithuania was independent. I was there on a Saturday, which is the wedding day. I sat in the central square watching couples emerge from the Kaunas town hall, originally built in 1542, and couldn’t help but imagine my ancestors getting married there on a Saturday 125 years ago.
Throughout my travels in Lithuania, I was gathering visual material–making rubbings of the built environment, making sketches, and taking photographs. Arriving at Kintai, I began the process of learning about the landscape, exploring the region on foot and by bicycle. My plan for the residency was to make plant inks. At my last residency in the Sawtooth Mountains in Idaho, I focused primarily on soil. It was fascinating to notice how this shift in focus changed my process; the living beings I was intentionally seeking presented themselves in different ways. New colors and forms emerged from the landscape, and as I researched and identified plants I began to piece together more of the story of how plants and people are intertwined in this place, like they are in every place.
As I began gathering and cooking plants to see if they would produce color, I noticed some patterns. All of the plants that turned into ink have medicinal uses. And so I researched medicinal plants in Lithuania and discovered that many of them grow here in Pennsylvania as “weeds.” Europeans brought them over as tools for healing, and now most of us rip them up, dump pesticides on them, and generally disregard them as medicine. I focused on building a relationship with plants that aren’t native to the US, although some are naturalized here.
I also continued photographing patterns and shapes in the ecosystems around Kintai, including the edges of the lagoon, the forests, the amazing Aukstumalas peat bog, and the sand dunes at the Curonian Spit, the strip of land separating the lagoon from the Baltic Sea. I also had the good fortune of visiting the Vydunas Museum in Kintai, which had an exhibit about Curonian weather vanes, an extraordinary example of folk art that inspired an idea: I plan to combine the form and symbolic structures of these works with surface design drawing from recurring visual motifs I saw in both the built environment and the more-than-human ecosystems.
Back in the US, I am grateful to have my inks as a tangible reminder of the land in Lithuania, and am excited to start using them.
