I Let my Works Decide what will Happen to Them

Urtė Janus is a London-based Lithuanian transdisciplinary artist making sculptural installations, video art, and set designs. I have had some questions for Urtė for quite some time, and the JCDecaux Prize exhibition at the National Gallery of Art until 3 December became a pretext to ask them. The exhibition includes the artist’s latest work All the Seas Long Gone. We talked about the journey of finding her forms of artistic expression, chemical experiments, the White Cliffs of Dover, her latest piece, the passage of time, death, and rebirth of her works. The recurring materiality in the conversation points both to and beyond the physical realm reminding me of the worlds Janus creates.

Julija Šilytė: Hi, Urtė. Firstly, I’d like to ask you about the variety of media you use. You have a degree in photography, and later started working in video art and sculpture. Can you reflect on this transition?

UJ: It was a journey. I gained a degree in photography some time ago. I chose it not knowing exactly what I wanted to do. I started studying photography, and noticed that I spent a lot of time making sets. The technology itself annoyed me, it seemed like an intangible thing. I spent a lot of time with a lot of electronic gadgets, but I was always more attracted by material things that I could touch. Later, I started working, and still do, with set designs in commercial photography, so I moved from photography to design. It is more related to production and various materials, and from that to sculpture. That was my journey.

JŠ: You mentioned your work as a set designer. I am curious about the commercial and non-commercial side of artistic work. Is being in a commercial or less commercial environment like putting on different hats for you?               

UJ: At some point, the commercial world started to annoy me. Maybe that is why I started focusing on my creative work. But when I started participating in exhibitions, I realised that my experience in the commercial sphere was very useful from an organisational point of view. I know where I should go if I need someone to produce something. I know where I can get different materials from. It taught me not to be afraid to contact people with various strange requests, to work with budgets, and many other practical aspects. I know how to get everything organised quickly. Now I have to learn how to step away from it sometimes. When you engage in creative work, you can be more flexible and improvise more. Now I am learning that I can do things more freely than in commercial jobs, where you agree that it has to be this way, and that is how it should be in the end.

JŠ: I am also curious about your residency with the Alexander McQueen Sarabande Foundation. The residency hosts many different creatives, designers, sculptors and goldsmiths, to name just a few. Can you talk about the dynamics of this environment? How much are you influenced by being surrounded by other media creative processes?

UJ: The residency lasted a year. The year was very intense. There were many layers to it. Being surrounded by creatives whose practices were so varied was what I really enjoyed. The residency has quite strict criteria, so it is pretty difficult to get in. They tend to choose unique characters, and that was very interesting. Everyone has their thing. Since our practices differ so much, there was no competition; although I doubt that any would have arisen anyway. Everyone does their own thing, but you can see that there are intersecting points, someone knows someone who works with similar things. The networking was quite intense.

This year I sometimes felt I was in an art reality show. They organise a lot of studio visits. People from different walks of life come to see your work. It happens that you’re working on something and have to reorient yourself quickly and explain what your practice is about in three minutes. Later you get used to it, and it’s all right. Different stars come to your studio and you sit there not knowing what to say. It was an interesting experience, but very intense. Maybe it led me to the Art and Ecology MA that I’ve just started. I realised that I need an environment with people with whom I can have more specific conversations.

JŠ: You mentioned an MA course. What’s the subject?

UJ: This is a pretty new MA course at Goldsmiths called Art and Ecology. From a more theoretical side, it combines the field of art with ecological science. It is a 15-month project-based MA course. You write a project and work with it in a studio. I am really enjoying the experimental structure of the course. You observe soil under a microscope, and hack satellites to observe clouds and weather. There is also a theory-based part, and at the same time you develop your project. So far, I’m very happy with the course.

JŠ: I’m intrigued by this transdisciplinarity, and the fact that knowledge does not get transferred to an academic text, but rather acquires other shapes.                          

UJ: This approach tends to be increasingly embraced, as in separating the Western thinking model and gaining knowledge through the senses and intuition. In my view, both practices are equal. I really like it that it is an academic course that acknowledges the sensory perception of reality. It is not a strictly theory-based course. For instance, one day we went to the Thames at low tide and stepped into the mud of the river in big wellies and just listened to the sounds in the environment.

JŠ: Sensitivity to materiality and the bodily processing of information are apparent in your work. You work with different materials. How do you find them, and how do you experiment with them? Do you employ any chemical methods? Do you perhaps consult chemistry textbooks?              

UJ: My use of chemistry is quite basic. What I am more interested in is the life of materiality. It has a life of its own outside the limits of our perception. I am interested in stepping outside the human-centric perception and exploring the environment that we tend to see as inanimate even though it is not the case. This is what I try to express with the help of chemical experiments.

I sometimes read about ways to secure matter from erosion. And then I do the opposite. I read about the processes that cause erosion, what the worst is, and try to see what we will get out of it. Now I am getting more and more interested in the histories of materials that I have around me, and where they come from … How the physical and industrial and planetary processes of metabolism unfold, how we digest the environment, how we create energy, where metabolic waste comes from … How all of these processes, so to speak, pass through our bodies, the environment and cities. Then the timescale comes to the fore too. I am fascinated by the life of materiality.

JŠ: Was there any material that sparked this research, in which you saw this passing-through?

UJ: It all started with my trips to the sea. The English coast is made of white chalk. The famous White Cliffs. I started reading about the cliffs, and realised that they are made out of the skeletons of prehistoric micro-organisms. And it was like wow. Beings that existed ages ago, their bodies turned into cliffs, whole islands and that rock, that calcium is washed away by the sea and becomes a component for new live beings. I really liked this idea, and started collecting chalk and using it in my work. Chalk is widely used industrially too. For instance, cement and concrete are made out of the same material. It is as if we are transforming and building the outer skeletons, buildings and houses, from that same material.

JŠ: People can currently see your latest work All the Seas Long Gone exhibited as part of the JCDecaux Prize exhibition at the National Gallery. For this work, you used rock salt, limestone and aluminium. How did you discover these materials?

UJ: The idea came when I was working on another project while doing research in London. The city is built on London clay. I started corresponding informally with a geologist. He wrote something to me, I wrote something to him. Our conversations revolved around London clay. He painted a picture of London clay as mud from a prehistoric sea, and that London a long time ago was at the bottom of a sea where tropical animals and plants grew. I became fixated on the sea, and started investigating prehistoric seas and salt rocks. I discovered that a large part of Europe was also at the bottom of the sea ages ago. The rock salt produced in Europe is that sea, and so I thought of the rock salt as a ghost of the sea. The water evaporated, and the material stayed. And how our culture formed around it. There are scattered salt mines throughout the salt layer. In Poland, there is Wieliczka, with its cathedrals. And in Germany and Switzerland. About aluminium … I was interested in thinking what material reflects our times best. I thought it was aluminium, because it is the most common material. It is extracted through chemical processes, you cannot dig it out just like that. There is an industrial process involved in the production of aluminium. That is why I used it. And limestone … Again, the theme of the sea. It is much older than the rock salt. So these were the time planes. Salt reacts with aluminium. When I was making salt sculptures, I worked in the woods, where it is very humid. The salt absorbed water to the extent that puddles appeared. Its reaction to the environment is what fascinates me. I am not sure if this will happen at the National Gallery, because the atmosphere there is quite controlled. The idea was that salt and water would appear, and over time, through very slow chemical processes, salt dissolves aluminium.

JŠ: Salt dissolves aluminium because of what is in the surroundings, as in humidity, among other things?

UJ: Yes.

JŠ: Were the tiles placed there with this intention?

UJ: Yes … When looking closely at the tiles, you can see various prehistoric molluscs. I bought them from a big building supplies company. In them, this prehistoric element is recorded for now.

JŠ: Time returns as a recurring topic. Rock salt is two hundred million years old. Limestone is five hundred and forty million years old. Aluminium was made in the 19th century. I want to think about incomprehensible time segments on the human scale and the geological violence that humans cause. On the other hand, when I was looking at your work, and its composition, I was thinking about thick time. It seems that the past, present and future overlapped, and it all started to happen simultaneously, just as you can sometimes feel when looking into the eyes of someone who is still growing up. Can you tell me about ways in which time figures in your creative processes, and more specifically how time flows in All the Seas Long Gone?

UJ: My parents are physicists. I come from a family of physicists. My grandmother was a physicist. We had many conversations about time, and about how you can comprehend it. I remember most vividly when my father once said that time can be measured by the degradation of materiality. I think that’s the way I see it. I once did an exercise. I wrote down ways in which time can be measured. It could be dripping, the formation of stalactites and stalagmites, degradation, and erosion. I see time from this point of view. I remember how I once talked with my father, and he said that when you start thinking deeply about the past or far into the future, then even from a scientific point of view, it becomes very challenging to understand how everything started, it is unfathomable. For humans to think about the future, especially the deep future, can be very complicated.

JŠ: Then time, so intangible, gains its shape through materiality. Let us go back to what you said in another interview: ‘The media I use sort of allow my works to die. I can just leave them outside and they will return to the environment. I don’t use any toxic materials in my work.’ Why is it important to you to allow your works to die?

UJ: It seems to me that we live at a time when many production processes, even in the art world, revolve around ways in which one can make something that would survive as long as possible. But I have always questioned whether this is necessary. Maybe again it is more interesting to embrace dying and decay, to let works react and change with the environment, and have a life of their own, not grasping at them with the conviction that they have to stay the same all the time. At the same time, thinking about time, temporality, and very tiny moments.

JŠ: These words remind me of auto-destructive art and the desire to shake up the usual ways in which works are received, along with the narrow understanding of what artistic work is. Are these topics relevant to you? Do you like looking back at art history?

UJ: I probably do it unconsciously. Over the last year, during all the studio visits, I had a lot of interesting conversations. Sometimes people are shocked. ‘Why should the work collapse?’ Or someone wanted to buy my work and asked if I could apply varnish so that it would not crumble and damage their carpet. Surely many interesting discussions arise this way.

JŠ: We have talked about ecology, and time but haven’t mentioned words such as anthropocene or the sixth mass extinction. What are your strategies for thinking and working with these topics? How do you reconcile how alarming this crisis is and hope for the future?

UJ: There are two sides to the extinction of species. The book about the sixth mass extinction was critical, it opened up discussions that extinction is happening. At the same time, I want to look to the future with hope. Anthropocene seems to me like the centring of the human being, all ideas about the human being, which becomes a geological force. It was crucial to raise this idea, but it is equally important to look beyond the anthropocene, and beyond the boundaries of a human being as the ruler that has to solve all problems. When looking at great extinction moments … For instance, when plants started to produce oxygen abundantly, the planet froze into a piece of ice, and could have remained as such. But because of the volcanic activity, the climate got warmer. Maybe life itself has a tendency to cause extinction, maybe that is part of being. There were extinctions before, and they were caused by various processes. I think it is key to accept these processes as equal to ours, and look somewhat outside human boundaries.

 

I was reading something just now about an artist and his work, which illustrates this thinking very well. He extracted phosphorus from his urine and made a meteor from it that he wanted to send into space. Phosphorus is understood as one of the elements necessary for the beginning of life. Through his body, he created something that could start life somewhere else. This is not anthropocentric thinking that the human being will colonise other planets. Possibly the element travelling throughout our bodies will give a start to something we cannot even imagine.

JŠ: We have talked about the death of works. Could they be reborn after their death?

UJ: The biggest challenge for me is to let them be. You initiate or do something and let them be because you cannot control certain processes. Rebirth is one of those processes that are not under my control. I sometimes catch myself thinking ‘I want it to be this way.’ But then I understand ‘No.’ The materials will do what they want to do. It is the same with rebirth, it is no longer under my control. I let my works decide what will happen to them.

JŠ: Thank you for the conversation.