LAURA DZELZYTĖ
Laura is a British/Lithuanian multidisciplinary artist who explores the complex relationship between the inner self and socially, culturally constructed identities. She reimagines religious stories and reinterprets scientific data to create alternative narratives, challenging particularly oppressive and rigid dogmas. In doing so she exposes paradoxes and myths and reveals contradictions in desires and beliefs concerning power, gender politics and freedom of choice.
Whether wax sculptures, large scale immersive video installations or drawing and pouring pigment on canvas, the choice of materiality for each project is always intentional. Laura plays with the tension between her need to control and the unpredictability of the material. Drawing inspiration from philosophy, old masters and contemporary dance, her figures are porous, multidimensional bundles of fragments in a constant process of metamorphosis and self-reassessment.
Laura studied sustainability at Cambridge and Painting MA at the Royal College of Art where she started a post-structural society "Parrhesia". In 2019 using maths Laura created a ground-breaking origami based self-collapsible container as an object to tackle plastic overconsumption. Her work has been exhibited across Europe and the UK, such as in conversations (on love) at Moco Museum London, and a solo exhibition scheduled at Sela Museum in Lithuania in August, 2025.
500 Opportunities to be Unequal
Phygital installation (3min video with sound and physical sculptures of recycled poly balls 60-120cm diameter)
The work is a contemplation on the impossible choices women face when seeking for fertility and equality.
Despite considerable gender convergence over the last decades, a substantial inequality persists. Much of the debate has been focused on discrimination, but recent research shows that the biggest factor in gender gap is in fact, a fertility penalty. However, fertility is deeply attached to female identity and self-worth (it is hard to say no to motherhood), and so it is a complex environmental / cultural as well as biological challenge.
Through this large scale immersive phygital project the artist explores the paradox as a way of processing her own traumatic experiences but also aims to be a voice of a generation of women navigating fertility in 21st Century.
500 is a representation of an average number of eggs ovaries release during a woman’s lifetime. These are 500 opportunities to have children and therefore be unequal. With companies offering egg freezing as part of their pay package, and science and technology are making leaps in artificial fertility, overriding rules of biological evolution, the choices women have to make in the quest for equality are not straighforward.
Presented at the Art'Otel Hoxton, London during the Women Artists' Art Week, June 8, 2024.
A sample of experience can be viewed here.
The Rite of Spring
