This ongoing artistic research explores the tension between the desire to belong and the formation of a moral façade that complicates the ability to define personal boundaries, leading to questions of identity and existence.
Titled You Are Not Invited to My Birthday, the project uses the metaphor of a birthday as a symbolic space of exclusion and boundary-setting. Through autoethnographic practice, the artist documents personal experiences in a diary, transforming emotional states and internal conflicts into artistic material. These reflections become the foundation for a mixed media practice that includes painting, installation, and the use of unconventional materials such as hair, soap, wax, seeds, and bodily-associated objects. The aim of the research is to understand and process personal experience through creation, while developing the ability to recognize and establish emotional and psychological boundaries. Vulnerability is approached as both material and method, opening a shared space of experience between artist and viewer.
The work reflects on contemporary pressures faced by young women to conform, the fragility of self-worth, and the internal conflict between authenticity and social acceptance. Ultimately, the project seeks to transform internal tension into material form, positioning art as a space for self-reflection, resistance, and boundary-making.
You are not invited to my birthday
Mitosis, 2025, acrylic and oil on canvas, 186x154 cm.
happy birthday to you. Happy birthday, happy birthday, happy birthday to you..., 2026, acrylic and oil on canvas, 93x71 cm
At three in the morning, sitting in front of a half-empty fridge and listening to its hum. Being illuminated by its light. Watching the cake you ate alone. Drinking alone. Having breakfast alone. The fridge drifts into the subconscious margins of everyday life, and today it becomes a slipping image, something falling out of grasp. Domestic space turns into a keeper of memory, significance, and (birthday) wishes. When we store food in the fridge, we extend its life. But what about cake? If we keep watching it, does the special day last longer, or does it fade faster instead? Are we refrigerators ourselves—preserving something within us from the outside world? Extending memories? What is their expiration date? What is… my expiration date? I can only hear my own whisper: Happy birthday… happy birthday, happy birthday, happy birthday…
I miss boxing deeply. I did not believe it was possible to fall in love with a sport—to crave it. To want to train, to hit, to strike, to learn combinations, footwork, to push through intense cardio. Wow, wow, wow.
This sculpture represents the birth of a new kind of love in my life. Teeth become symbols of memory and discomfort. Mouthguards are used during sparring, where your opponent is not your enemy. Where the fight becomes a kind of dance—but not with another person, rather with oneself. This sport becomes a particular state of being with yourself, where you encounter something that usually does not surface. Since I injured my wrist and have been forced to give up boxing for several months, I feel a deep sense of grief—my love has been taken away from me. Internal sparring takes place between “I want” and “I cannot.”
Three candles symbolize three months without boxing.
Sparring, or my love was taken from me, 2026, wax, ≈10x6x6 cm
Thinking about fitting in, 2026, acrylic and oil on wood panel, paintbrush, ≈52x40 cm
Mochi, 2025, acrylic and oil on canvas, 15x10 cm
Fig, 2025, acrylic and oil on canvas, 20x20 cm
Mitosis is a type of nuclear division in eukaryotic cells, during which two genetically identical daughter cells are formed from a single parent cell. The processes of mitosis are essential for tissue regeneration. This process heals and repairs wounds.
This painting is the second part of the earlier work Mitosis. Its form corresponds closely with the concept of the title—it is almost circular, resembling a cell dividing into two identical daughter cells through mitosis. It appears as if it has separated from the painting Mitosis, becoming an identical yet independent universe.
Mitosis II, 2026, acrylic and oil on wood panel, 15x10 cm
I (don't) have time, 2026, acrylic and oil on canvas, human hair, bar of soap, 120x100 cm
In 7th grade I had peers I don't know come up to me and talk about my ass.
Once after parking I had an old man chase me and call me a slut for front parking.
I had an old guy spit on me at a bus stop. One was chasing me in a 9 floor stairway.
I'm surrounded by phalluses that are forced into places they should'nt be. They are peeing in my party.
In this painting I'm portraying every person with my face, showing my multiplicity. Every man is full of sexual energy with a condom in his pocket or hands on his junk. Every woman is gifted with birthday candles, that I, the worlds ass, am distributing from the windowsill. It's a symbol of awareness.I want to teach all women to draw their boundaries, stop apologising and accomodating themselves. Men are drinking menstrual bloodd. The phallic lamp on the wall becomes erect when there's a woman nearby. There's a person that does not know how to use the gift of awareness. She's jealous. There's a woman who's scared to puff the birthday candle smoke. And finally there's a man stepped in something. Me. He stepped on me, he trampled me, he pouted his lip and got disguisted. I am the unneeded luxury in a party - a king prawn.
This painting was a finalist to ZABOLIS art prize 2026, based on Lithuanian novel „Vilniaus pokeris”. This novel showed me, that I can be more open, more in pain, more disguisting, just like it is in real life. I had a lot of cursewords and phalluses collecting inside. Until reading that book, I was scared to let them come up to the surface. But finally I felt the right to talk about my reality, exactly how it is.
Life is a ball, but I'm that shrimp, 2026, acrylic and oil on canvas, 120x1oo cm
