Wed 19 aug
I rested well and woke up starfishing with just my head and limbs hanging out from under the empty sheet as I had used the duvet as an extra pillow. I get up and move around stealthily while others sleep; shower, unpack and repack my bag. Again breakfast is microwave podge, this time with a peach, and I sit out the back on a pier to read Decolonozing Nature by TJ Demos. I have read most of this before, but I’m starting again because I have been training myself to absorb subtext and note quotations rather than just looking at the words. I have two hours until I need to leave (which would in normal circumstances fill me with anxiety) and can’t faff because I have to check-out of the hostel so head straight out with my rucksack along the seafront and almost immediately get distracted by an Amber Museum. There are a number of German tourists (one has a flag pinned to his shirt and I can pick up on a few pronunciations) having a guided tour around the garden so I dart into the middle and join. Incredible samples of thousand-year-old amber-preserved insects; I’ve never seen this before apart from in Jurassic Park. The driftwood / shipwreck vibe is jarring but the animated guide is making me stay. As soon as the group get inside I jump out and continue walking north, parallel to the coast, coming to an unusual graveyard decorated with obscure handmade pine headstones. They’re so characterful I’m smiling, and give another example of the sort of pre-industrial craft that I’ve found prevalent in Lithuania - conveniently I find this text about Luddites and the modern resistance against efficiency. I continue westwards through an empty pine forest and find the beach and all the people. I spend more time creaming up than I do in the sea.
I get back to town and queue for the bus to Smiltyne which takes an hour. I slip the driver extra money to take my bike and it’s still cheaper than any journey in UK. I pay 50 cents for the 4-minute ferry back to Klaipeda mainland then get an ice cream and circle the city until my train. My journey ends with a 50 minute cycle back to Rupert and there’s a radio station birthday party in the garden so I grab a beer and listen to thumping techno - a National Treasure.
Thurs 20 AUG
wake up early put a pot of herbal tea on, send out week2 diary and then prep for meeting w curator Kotryna. Feel like I forget everything about my practice and why I’m here or what I’m doing and end up talking disjointed crap for over an hour. Spend 3 hours afterwards sulking at my desk then take myself for a walk and gather some;
wide plantain, mugwort, goldenrod, marjoram, wild hops, blackberry shoots
for drying and speak to mum while paddling in the river.
Spend 2 hours prepping food for dinner and next day’s lunch while watching another incredible National Food Service webinar then simmer bramble for a mordant (fixing) bath I'll use tomorrow for my test ecodye.
Make loads of plastic cording while watching Oh, My Venus, and should have gone to bed much earlier, I did spend some silent time thinking about what I'd like to achieve tomorrow, I would say this is progress
FRI 21 aug
woke up sweating after some trippy dreams about getting lost in the woods. soothe my brain with banana on toast and a crappy coffee that instantly gets me too pumped. I meet up with Anna the cleaner again and we deep clean another section of the kitchen - it’s a very natural collaboration, we speak about her family and how she likes her job while re-organising shelves and making suggestions for more usable arrangements. She comments how no-one has done this with her before, and I say I think all residents should help, to which she replies “much better working together”.
As my textiles are simmering in the bramble mordant bath, I shoot out to collect dye materials - berries, cones, roots, rose petals, lichen.
Tautvydas looks like he is making lunch for 50ppl but turns out it’s just for him so I invite myself to eat some of it as a favour. Baked aubergine w kebab spices, fried tofu, a great salad and some fregola (big cous cous / small pasta orbs). I bring kraut and oat kvass as accoutrements.
I ecodye the pillow cases I have prepped, then spend time writing a tutorial which I later release after hitting 100 substack subscribers :)
Drink a glass of wine and eat ice cream at the restaurant behind Rupert, then spend almost three hours talking to Pbae on the phone.
SAT 22 aug
I really max out this morning, read in bed then force into 20 minutes of Yoga with Adrienne. Tend to some emails, including an exciting essay commission and reading some other good substacks - BOOKS, Marigold, In Digestion, and this one by Alicia Kennedy.
After much faffing I leave my studio and cycle into central to meet T & C. We drive north-east to Visaginas though countryside that resembles the South Downs; undulating hills, tractors and haystacks, rape fields. The lake we walk to is large and flat and still, I walk in at least 200m before the water is waist-height. The afternoon sun is warm and I stand with my feet sunk in the sand for quite a long time until extremeties go pruny and I get freaked out. We eat an array of plastic-wrapped classic Lithuanian snacks including:
kepta duona (fried bread)
balta misraine (potato salad)
pumpkin dip
crisps (many)
fake cheesestring
pomidoru (tomatoes)
spurgos (tiny donuts w cream)
horrible white wine
I decide to get a train home in the evening (only 1/10th the price of the equivalent journey at home), and spend it glued to my phone which is stupid. I often miss opportunities to sit in silence with my thoughts, and eternally delay indulging myself in reflection - it creates a very obtuse numbness that I can only fathom now I write it. I talk about this occasionally in therapy and think it has to do with a lack of self-worth, most probably (as usual) a result of external stimulus and micro-oppressions that I have internalised. I stop for a pint of alus and a shot of herba devynia, and continue w Haraway’s Staying with the Trouble. She is infiltrating my straight way of reading texts with a multi-multi-layering of ideas, textures and wisdom - unfolding complex and rich linguistic networks, knitting across the perceived gap between humans and ‘critters’. With this book I notice less the information being shared, more the method of propagation; the experience of reading has become very meta and enjoyable in itself.
I cycle back to my studio along the canal, concentrating on my breathing and mistaking specks of sand flipping up from the front tyre hitting my face for swarms of gnats.
SUN 23 Aug
I’d planned this lazy day in all week, it was the only thing that was going to shift my shitty mood. Teklife mix on loud, buckets of coffee and cleaning the studio. Washed my clothes. Tidied my desk and washed the floor. Hung some new work up and even read a little on the bean bag.
After the whirlwind I went out for a walk to collect some berries and herbs for some wild sodas I wanted to make. Got some big jars, cut some cloth for the tops and stirred some sugar into water I’d left to dechlorinate overnight with bilberries, mirabelles, hops, raspberry leaf, heather, ground ivy.
Spend a great chunk of the day speaking to friends over the phone. I wait for a call from my brother in Denmark but it never comes.
And that’s it, that’s dish.
MON 24 aug
I think today was one of those horrid ones where I freak out about my productivity, then basically lock myself away to find things to work on, of varying importance, from should have done this last week to I just made this up to distract myself. This really ties in with my tendencies to procrastinate / waste time as a result of low self-esteem and obsessing over minutae. This period away is a perfect opportunity to practise a positive thinking-style, and to a degree I’m pleased with my efforts, but there is always a creeping feeling I’m not doing enough or that it is of any value. But to who? And enough of what?
The deep-rooted need for validation is a feeling that plagues many, for myriad reasons, and leads inevitably to undesirable levels of people-pleasing or flagellation, inauthenticity or self-hate. The attention economy has been pressure-cooked by our dependence on other people’s opinions of us, and I would argue although very easy to blame social media and other contemporary evils, these are but framing devices.
Our shared enemy, the Final Boss, is the crushing weight of expectation to out-perform our predecessors in their own image, without any of the same resources or values. We are supposed to win a game we don’t want to play, with rules that aren’t made clear, and with no pieces on the board.
This underdeveloped extended metaphor I think subconsciously came from this Kimberley Jones video that I must have watched a hundred times, it made me cry and shake violently, it gave me goosebumps. I am not comparing the two, White fragility and the Black struggle, they are incomparable. But we should listen to the words, the emotional anguish bolted together with eloquence and defiance.
We don’t own anything.
We need to shatter the singularity of goal-based progress.
Tues 25 Aug
Today I am in good spirits, I take some time to prepare a package to send for an exhibition in Cornwall, go and buy some nice bread, bottle up some soda and send some emails. I cycle down the river path by the Neris and mistake swarms of gnats for specks of sand flipping up off my tyre and hitting me in my face.
The afternoon is spent preparing for my workshop in the evening at Rupert - a wild food walk and kraut demo - and eating crisps and fruit. The workshop runs over, the first I’ve done in months obviously, but it is invigorating.