"If (you’re) alive – may the sea foam milk If (you’re) dead – may the sea foam blood…”

Jacquard woven piece woven by Kristina Austi.
Materials: Wool, viscose, polyester.
Size: 165x400 cm
Year of production: 2022

The inspiration for the work is a unique folk tale from my homeland, Lithuania: "Egle the Queen of Snakes". The story contains many references to Baltic mythology. It is a long tale with a tragic ending, where the protagonist, Egle, stands at the seashore at the end, calling for her beloved:

"If you are alive – come with foam of milk; if you are dead, come with foam of blood". Foam of blood appears, and she realizes that her beloved is dead. In despair, she transforms her three sons into oak, ash, and birch trees. She curses her youngest daughter to become an eternally trembling aspen as she reveals to the wicked uncles how to lure the father from the sea. Egle herself was transformed into an eternally mourning spruce.

Of course, this work is made in the present, where many people have lost and are losing their loved ones in a terrible war that is going on in Europe. The boundless evil is not understandable with sound reason. One can only feel it as immense powerlessness and grief like a flowing mass of hot lava slowly moving with destructive force.

The work is a 4m long and 1.65m wide carpet woven on a digital jacquard loom. First, I made sketches on paper, then I digitized the idea, the next step was to create many bindings that made the threads behave as I had thought. Then, I wove material samples on a manual digital loom. There are many different qualities of threads that are intertwined: wool, viscose, and polyester. They lie layer upon layer on a surface I wanted to bubble and "flow". White, black, and red threads are woven together in dozens of bindings and loose floats. Finally, I wove the entire work on an industrial loom. Some of the threads were cut after the work was finished weaving.

Photographer of the work: Kristina Austi.