Alluring Softness for the Body. An interview with Marija Puipaitė

Marija Puipaitė (b. 1987) explores the significance of the body, and intimate and sensual experience in relation to the object. Her work has been exhibited at Design Weeks in Milan, Eindhoven, London, Paris, the Zaha Hadid Gallery and Mint Gallery in London, the Latvian National Museum of Art, the Estonian Museum of Applied Art and Design, and the Collectible Design Fair in Brussels. She is represented by the Vartai Gallery. In recent years, she has expanded her individual creative projects into curatorial practice. She has curated exhibitions at the Vartai Gallery and the Lithuanian Museum of Applied Art and Design. She is currently a PhD student at Vilnius Academy of Art, and a lecturer in the Design Department of Vilnius Academy of Art.

Viltė Visockaitė: In your first letter in our correspondence, you mentioned that your personal work is on hold. Tell me more about your doctoral thesis, which has distracted you from artistic practice for some time.

Marija Puipaitė: Doctoral studies are a new phase, in which I have reimagined the basis of the intuitive nature of my work, and what the next step in exploring a sensory relationship with objects could be. At first, I could hardly imagine that I would also have to change my methods on this path, starting conventionally with theory, and then moving on to practice. It was a while before I was able to position myself somewhere between the academic research which fascinated me and more authentic artistic research. So for a while I was holding back in my artistic practice. In recent years, I’ve also put a lot of energy into curating design exhibitions, so my personal work has naturally taken a back seat.

In my PhD research, I examine the human’s intimate relationship with objects, such as clothes and furniture, in the context of Western culture, trying to understand how it would be possible to create a new object today with the same significance that it used to have (of course, with a critical eye on historical meanings and narratives). My research explores the phenomenon of the agency of things, and thus tries to address a possible solution to unconscious consumerism. As a connecting link, I choose a fabric that covers and hides, but also reveals, bodies and furniture. I connect historical references, focusing on the sensory significance of textiles and their role as a mediator in creating an intimate relationship with the object. I pay attention to the wearing down and cracks in the object, which give it a Walter Benjamin aura. By showing the hidden layers, the wearing down and cracks expose the object and reveal its essence. In this way, I draw parallels between historic costumes and upholstery, the underlayers of a garment and the structure of a piece of furniture, inevitably challenging the dominant visual representation in design.

VV: What is your approach to historic furniture and objects? How do they overlap with contemporary design?

MP: My journey into the world of objects began with historical furniture. I grew up around antique furniture, and at the age of five I wanted to be an archaeologist. From a young age, historical household exhibitions in museums fuelled my fantasies. (And then there are costume dramas …!) That’s how I got into design. Now, since encountering the collections in Lithuanian museums and curating the exhibition ‘The Invisibles. Historic Furniture from a Contemporary Design Perspective’, together with Vytautas Gečas and Monika Lipšic, at the Museum of Applied Art and Design in Lithuania, I have had the opportunity to combine my two passions into one context. And it has become clear what one field can bring to another. I realised what contemporary design lacks, and why objects in museum storage are not fully appreciated. Seeing a historic piece of furniture as a design object can encourage a more open and active approach by the visitor in the museum. The uniqueness of an object isn’t determined only by its artistic value or its rarity. It can also be, for example, the particular wearing down of a mass-produced item. Asking what needs to be said about a piece of historical furniture has made me think about the essence of the design object. That’s what I’m looking at now.

VV: You’re involved in a kind of anatomy of furniture: it’s not just the outside that matters, but also the inside of the furniture. Why has what is usually hidden become a research object for you?

MP: In my practice, I have analysed the object on different sensory levels: from the materiality to the realisation. However, I want an object to be as real as possible, and as little like a prop as possible, so the guts of the object are inevitably important. I was inspired by the exaltation of the internals at the turn of the 16th and 17th century, which was strongly influenced by the emergence of anatomy as a scientific practice. The guts and individual organs were expressed as a leitmotif in literature, visual art, liturgical texts, and so on. During this period, the internals of the body, inseparable from the spiritual dimension, hid important truths, virtues and sins, where only God had direct access, and were transformed into a metaphor for the human’s acquired knowledge. Thanks to science, unknown knowledge, the mysterious interior of the body, has become accessible to the human eye. An example would be the desire of Shakespeare’s protagonists Hamlet and Othello to get inside someone else, even very directly, to get into the guts in order to know the hidden truth, to reach the conscience of the king. This reflects a conflict in the world-view of the time: an attempt to accept that the body, which until then was hidden under a veil of mystery, had become unmasked, objectified. In her famous speech at the end of the 16th century, Elizabeth I asserted her authority by stressing that her body may have been that of a weak woman, but her heart and stomach were those of a king. Later, sacralised parts of the body were transformed into a reflection of the mechanistic view of the body. Thomas Hobbes writes in Leviathan that the heart is a spring and the nerves are just cords. Meanwhile, my view of furniture is really counter-mechanistic.

VV: The starting point for your work is the human body. Why is that? How does the sensory conception of the body influence your practice?

MP: The emphasis on sensory perception allows us to look at materials, forms and objects not mechanically or functionally but through experience. The body as a starting point avoids artificial or contrived solutions. I accept it as a given that organically defines the conditions of the future object.

VV: We can usually find textiles in contemporary art exhibitions and as a subject in art and design research. They also have a very important place in your practice, and eventually become an intermediate material between the human being and the furniture. How do textiles affect the human senses and create the value of a piece of furniture?

MP: Fabric has a strong, intimate, sensual, erotic charge, which is due to the physical properties of the material and the cultural codes that have developed. Working with fabric, holding it in your hands, and touching it, generates pleasure. It caresses, moves, makes a noise, and transforms itself. In their interaction with the body, textiles seduce both by revealing and hiding it. In the same way, I imagine textiles on a piece of furniture: they can give additional meanings, and make it more mystical, but they can also unmask it. A soft, sensual, shiny, translucent fabric is like a membrane. It acts as a direct seduction tool that reinforces the importance of sensory experience in design.

VV: I found your approach to the restoration of old furniture as an ambivalent practice very interesting and unexpected! You also mentioned the morality of design.

MP: When thinking about the deterioration of furniture, and about historic furniture in general, thoughts inevitably turn to restoration, the reconstruction that is sought, its ethical and creative aspects. I try to understand to what extent it makes sense to return an object to its past as it was, rather than to articulate what it is now. It is the same with a design object. One can ask when it reveals itself and makes sense: when it is newly created and presented, or when it has lived a unique life, leaving the mark of time.

VV: Layers of fabric, the drapery, the tears, the wearing down take on a different meaning in your practice and articulate the historical dimension in a different form. What materials do you choose to realise your works, and how? What kind of value do they give the final result?

MP: I choose my materials more intuitively. It is usually only later that I find out about their cultural and semantic references. The aspect of pleasure is important to me, when a material appeals instinctively, or evokes abstract bodily associations, such as the smooth surface of wood or velvet. I’m currently experimenting with materials that are more for garments, but they can also be applied to furniture. I draw parallels between often-used linen, sometimes silk and later cotton undershirts as a basis in historical costume, and linen as underlayers in traditional upholstery technology. The meaning can be altered by the processing and manipulation of the material.

VV: I know that you are currently in Venice. You mentioned a project that will combine design and contemporary art practices in the context of Renaissance culture.

MP: The artist Goda Palekaitė, who is on a residency at the Fondazione Cini in Venice, and I are exploring the Renaissance culture of courtesans as an early manifestation of feminism: their creative emancipation, their ambiguous social mobility, and their personal freedom. We are trying to find cracks through which we can see what has been concealed or what speculatively ‘could have been’, thus questioning the construction of a factful, male-written history, in which the extremes of the woman-courtesan or the woman-saint figure. The project will thus combine not only art and design, but also historical and anthropological research practices. We are both interested in storytelling through matter, and in an intimate approach to history, where the viewer can experience it personally. I am also very curious about the result of combining our two different practices and disciplines. We are planning a dual exhibition at the Vartai Gallery next autumn, and we will also be presenting the research at the Faculty of Arts and Design at the Iuav University of Venice.