Black White Sea (2025)
Three drawings, 300×200 cm, pastel on paper.
Currently on display in the group exhibition Down Deep: Living seas, living bodies (W głębi: Żyjące morza, żyjące ciała) at the Sopot State Art Gallery. Curators: Joseph Constable, Eulalia Domanowska, Joanna Gemes
In this project, I explore the paradoxical nature of experiencing, naming, and perceiving reality. Through this exploration, I seek to express what it feels like to live by the Baltic Sea while knowing that, not far away, the Black Sea has become a central area of war.
The project began with a journey across the Baltic Sea, taken to attend a residency. During the long boat ride, there were no distractions, only openness of the sea, horizon, steady wind. In that quiet, suspended time, I carried with me a theme I wanted to explore during the residency. It was early autumn 2023, and the war in Ukraine had already been ongoing for some time. I felt an urgency to reflect on fragility: the fragility of peace, which can be shattered in an instant.
The starting conceptual point of the project became the names of the Black Sea and the Baltic Sea. In Lithuanian, the etymology of “Baltic” shares its root with the word for the color white. The Black Sea, meanwhile, received its name from the cardinal direction north, which in Mediterranean cultures was historically associated with the color black. Yet today, the Black Sea lies to the southeast rather than the north. From the perspective of someone living by the Black Sea, the Baltic Sea is the one located in the north. This shift exposes how one’s point of view destabilizes what we often consider objective positions.
Another layer of subjectivity emerges through color itself. Sea water is neither black nor white. Only on the surface when the sunlight hits the water, the image seems to color in white and darkness.
Sometime after the journey, these two thought-image began to merge: the delicate, shifting light on the water’s surface and the idea of shifted point of view of places of peace or war. The light on water surface became a metaphor. Something gentle and beautiful, yet inherently fragile. Beneath the surface is a quiet darkness, (maybe hidden threat). The same fragility that allows beauty to emerge also contains the potential for destruction.
For this project, I created large-scale drawings on paper using pastel. The fragility of materials – paper and soft pastel were for me the most appropriate mediums of expression. Furthermore, I used impressionists’ technique when only seeing a drawing from a distance can be comprehended as a coherent image; however, as the viewer moves closer, the image becomes an abstract field of lines shades and dots. This shift in perception mirrors the project’s central concerns: how meaning, stability, and clarity depend on distance and point of view. The sea, like peace, can seem calm and coherent from afar, yet up close it reveals fragility, uncertainty, and fragmentation.
