Photo reportage from the exhibition 'Legroom' by Ona Juciūtė atLa Halle, Centre d’art, Pont-en-Royans, France

November 27, 2024
Author Echo Gone Wrong

Published in Baltics Outside Baltics Photo / Video from Lithuania

Ona Juciūtė, ‘A Day in Bed’, aluminum, puff pastry, 2024. Exhibition ‘Legroom’ at la Halle de Pont-en-Royans.Photo: Blaise Adilon

Ona Juciūtė is interested in the memory load carried by objects and the traces of gestures left in the material itself. As a sculptor, she pays particular attention to manual craftsmanship in the manufacturing process, as well as to the textures and reliefs of the material.

By observing her surroundings, she was exposed to certain making techniques, particularly carpentry, at an early age. Craftsmanship in cabinetry is fading due to the industrialisation of mass-produced furniture, while attention to wood, its species, and fibres is being lost. The cuts and finishes become more precise due to increasingly efficient machines and the use of composite or artificial materials. In this context, the artist develops a personal practice, bridging disappearing techniques and once-common materials.

Juciūtė draws inspiration from manual work and the ways in which these practices are kept alive today. Over the course of her career, she has surrounded herself with people who continue to keep different traditions alive. Then economic, today more decorative, these traditions are in a semi state. Adapting, downgrading, and passing down the crafts and techniques of yesteryear, Juciūtė collaborates with various specialists and tries to reproduce the gestures of obsolete trades while transforming the final shapes. Domestic objects lose their original function and are transformed to the point where the initial model is being forgotten.

For La Halle, the artist developed a specific body of work during a creative residency in September 2024 at La Fabrique des Luddites in Chatte, France. She proposes new works that engage with the manufacturing activities historically present in the region (textiles, charcoal production, etc.), revisiting these practices through the lens of Lithuanian tradition or by resonating them with techniques from elsewhere. Her research focuses both on the production of forms and the unexpected and surprising changes that occur differently each time, depending on the components and elements involved.

Legroom, written as a single word, is a recent term used to quantify our comfort zone – such

as when reserving a seat for travel. It can also apply to the right balance or the necessary spacing between artworks that arises when setting up an exhibition, imagining a comfortable walk through the space. More literally (and humorously), it refers to the light installation designed for the showcase space in front of La Halle, where visitors encounter a photo reproduction of an object from Lithuanian folklore that activates at dusk. This object is a carved wooden mortar, whose author and exact date remain unknown. Curious in form, enigmatic in its function, and polysemic in its definition, this object gives a direction to the whole exhibition – an exhibition that places at heart an artistic approach researching the transformation of elements and the formal ambiguity that results.

Experimental in nature, the works discovered in the rooms (and elsewhere) of the art centre are imbued with the influence of fire and light. The artist expands her usual scope of reflection on production to question the energy qualities of the material and the visual evidence of the process.

The Kcals series clearly demonstrates this approach. During her residency at the foot of the Vercors mountain region, Juciūtė discovered the work of Sébastien Perroud, who still carries on the tradition of manual charcoal making today. To evolve this practice, he brings together various disciplines – from art to science, – transforming wood into charcoal. Thanks to this encounter and collaboration, Juciūtė’s sculptures and ready-mades undergo a metamorphosis – shrinking, exploding, and darkening in the pyrolysis oven that Sébastien operates. In twenty-four hours, the new piece’s resemblance to the original object decreases: its size shrinks, its density changes, and some of its pieces disintegrate. The more the appearance of the original tools fades, the more a new imaginary replaces these now-outdated references. Once-familiar forms are now

unknown, frozen in a hardened mass yet very fragile. Presented in a simple way, these pieces are not remnants of a completed form but new signs to be grasped in their multiplicity.

Further on, Night Outs reverse this process – materially, temporally, and formally.

Extracted from a mine, these blocks of mineral charcoal are altered by Juciūtė to evoke a familiar object, once a common decorative piece in interiors. They punctuate the first room like meteors, capturing light on their surface. These ashtrays are associated not only with smoke and combustion but also with recreation and evenings spent outdoors despite darkness.

On the wall, textile elements are hung like abstract forms. However, after closer inspection, we can recognise worn clothes (Head&Shoulders) or rags and scraps of fabric left outside (Inside Outs). The artist unseams the garments, unties the knots, irons them and reveals the initial shapes that existed before the objects were manufactured and handled. Bleached by the sun, time, and work, these works stand as sentinels of transformation, bearing the marks of a cycle that could begin anew. This idea of return and circularity is also captured in the film Fakes. Here, the artist explores the manufacturing techniques of Senko Hanabi, a small, handmade Japanese firework. Its production has never been industrialised, and its recipe is held as a secret passed on from generation to generation. The artist has attempted to recreate the explosive from speculative online tutorials – her result only resembles the original. The ignition and the initial drop of fire, followed by the sparks it produces, are moments of brief, intense joy, preserved and stretched out by the looping video editing and questioned by the ‘falseness’ of the traditional technique.

To be discovered in an unexpected place, A Day In Bed is a sculpture-sign that, through the combination of aluminium and a seemingly incongruous element – puff pastry – results in a novel material. Neither organic nor inert, it represents a different kind of component, freezing the fusion of metal just as the explosion of a burned pastry is captured.

Throughout the exhibition, Juciūtė presents works that crystallize a gesture and a practice, a duration and a process yet do not claim any symbolic meaning or propose a value scale. Her works appear as ephemeral traces of different ways of doing things. In tension between a bygone time and the present, creation and dissolution, her work is captured in a fleeting moment that is already on the verge of becoming obsolete. Neither ‘purist’ nor ‘melancholic’, her approach embraces circularity – the possibility that everything can be transformed, erased, but also remade.

Giulia Turati

This exhibition and residency is organised as part of the Season of Lithuania in France 2024 and the Ciconia Ciconia project (led by Studio Ganek, Lyon and LIAA, Vilnius, together with La Halle, centre d’art contemporain de Pont-en-Royans and Polaris de Corbas), and in partnership with Moly-Sabata Résidence d’artistes / Fondation Albert Gleizes. The Season of Lithuania in France 2024 is organized by the Lithuanian culture Institute and the French Institute in Paris.

Artist: Ona Juciūtė
Exhibition title: Legroom
Dates: 12 October to 21 December, 2024
Location: La Halle, Centre d’art. Place de la Halle. 38680 Pont-en-Royans, France

Photographer: Blaise Adilon

Ona Juciūtė, ‘A Day in Bed’, aluminum, puff pastry, 2024. Exhibition ‘Legroom’ at la Halle de Pont-en-Royans.Photo: Blaise Adilon