I returned to Australia with boxes of vintage covers and a lifetime supply of collage material (minus wolves). I also brought home three-months’ worth of dairy-product cartons featuring Estonian and Lithuanian weaving motifs, even though I had no idea what I would do with them at the time. I am such a sucker for Baltic textiles that I even purchased products I would not otherwise buy because they featured a different design. (I don’t recommend the rye bread flavoured yoghourt). I was not going to leave them behind.
The looping forms of the weaving motifs were reminiscent of pagan jewellery uncovered in archaeological digs in the Baltics. Back in my Northcote studio, I began cutting and interweaving the forms and using these to dictate the form of the final, gatefold book, the inlaid covers drawing from the dairy’s logo.
The alchemical promise of preciousness from junk has always been alluring and supremely satisfying. Bookmaking took off in earnest and the examples I brought in at the start of class became increasingly ambitious and elaborate, with increasingly lengthy turnarounds. Once again, I found myself spending 600 hours on an individual work.
The books continued to be responsive to materials and binding methods. For example, a vintage sci-fi book cover became a star book – a variation of the concertina that opens to form a star – became a story of space junk and otherworldliness, populated with creatures from the deep-sea domain of star fish, as alien as anything from outer space. I took subversive delight in constructing my elaborate and fanciful fictions from the factual encyclopaedia illustrations.
I also turned to Baltic legends and folktales for motifs and narratives. Eglė the Serpent Queen, one of Lithuania’s most popular legends, informed one of my most ambitious books, The Trees Mourn with the Serpent Queen. In the tale, Eglė (Spruce/Fir) becomes the unwilling bride of the sea snake and is taken from her home to live beneath the sea. The tale is rich in symbolism such as false animal brides, a traitorous cuckoo, subterranean palace, and transformation into trees. While Eglė ultimately comes to love her new life, her birth home still calls to her. Eglė’s divided loyalties recall my grandmothers’ nostalgia for Lithuania and their stubborn Lithuanianess, while being happy and grateful to be living in Australia – a common diaspora experience. Motifs from the tale, particularly the snake, have begun to infiltrate other artworks as well.
Like the beasts in Kivirähk’s novel who are hypnotised by serpent speech, I have become bewitched by the siren song of the snake. As with the wolf, the serpent has been routinely demonised, coming pre-loaded with Western symbolism and mythology. Snakes hold a unique – if different – place in the national psyche of both Lithuanians and Australians. In Lithuania, which boasts a grand total of two snake species, the grass snake or žaltys assumes a benevolent guise as protector of the home, fed saucers of milk to encourage its patronage. In the antipodes, by contrast, the snake is synonymous with Australia’s infamy for deadliness. This promises a fertile tension, particularly given that I was born in the Year of the Snake. The wolf skin is being shed for a snakeskin.
