Last night my friend and long-time colleague Brigita Krassaukaite arrived at my home armed with beer and a packet of Quadratini dark chocolate wafer biscuits. I don’t drink beer but I do eat wafer biscuits. I had put a bottle of Beaume de Venise Muscat in the refrigerator for Brigita who drinks sweet wine and eats wafer biscuits. She had come over late, she felt, though it was only eight-thirty, to work on her bio for her debut rug design at the International Contemporary Furniture Fair this weekend. I had asked when we met last week if I might read it.
After she was seated comfortably in the armchair I said, “Your bio is perfect if what you’re looking for is a job in corporate and your aim is to be as interesting as last week’s news.” She unleashed her infectious laugh. Almost nothing can quash Brigita’s love of life, its absurdities, its mysteries. Her love is expressed in her personal beauty, her tenderness toward all living things (except cockroaches), her love of individuality, her advocacy of aesthetic beauty and strength in Woman, her deep love of art…and her most disarming quality, an unquenchable openness to truth.
I have known Brigita for fourteen years, through perhaps some of the most difficult years of my life, in my capacity as an administrator of my father’s estate. Through thick and thin she was there for me. And, more importantly, for my father’s art. Perhaps out of everything she did for my father’s art and his estate, all of which I have not one second’s doubt my father would have admired, approved and been proud of, it is her trustworthiness and optimism that remain most dear to me. I mention these two particular qualities of her as art expert, colleague and friend because she shares them in her rug Stand, in spite of its sobering inspiration. Stand will be on display in the Dandelion Rugs booth, as part of the International Contemporary Furniture Fair at the Jacob K. Javits Conference Center, May 14-17, 2016.
What always disarms me when I speak with Brigita about art, in spite of knowing her well enough that I should no longer be taken by surprise, is her originality of thought, her depth of felt perception, and her unerring ability—like an arrow released from Artemis’ bow—to strike at the heart of a work’s voice, its illumination of the culture that gave birth to it through the artist’s vision and sensibility. I think I am always caught off guard because Brigita always speaks so little about herself. She rarely displays the depth of her knowledge of art and life, either philosophical or practical, unless asked point blank. It is like tapping on the side of a mountain, not expecting much to happen because in general a mountain is still, silent, tranquil, and suddenly finding oneself inside Aladdin’s cave, surrounded by infinite treasures and gems hitherto unimaginable.
It took very little effort on my part to revise her bio with her and bring her vision and voice to the page. (As I write this about voice and vision I am reminded of Peter Brook’s famous statement on producing a play: If you just let a play speak, it may not make a sound. If what you want is for the play to be heard, then you must conjure its sound from it.) If you wait for Brigita to speak about herself she may never utter a sound—that much was clear from her original bio. It would have served well as a wrapper for fish and chips from a chip-shop in the old days when this quintessentially English and best of all take away foods was liberally sprinkled with salt and malt vinegar and wrapped in old newsprint. But her bio did not serve well to describe her as an artist, and designer of textiles and rugs.
If you spend time in communion with Stand, you may find yourself drawn into the world of an extraordinary mind and soul. Brigita’s mind absorbs everything life has to offer, as much as any one mind can. Her soul breathes in and releases the eternal beauty of Woman and her stand in the culture into which she finds herself born.
I had only seen an early sketch, a tiny photograph on an iPhone screen. I was unprepared for the finished work: a collision of universes assailing my visual and emotional experience, transfiguring an object of everydayness into the ineffable.
She wrote later that night, “I would never found Myself in words without you.” I did not reply. If I had, I might have said: “I would never have found you in words without you.”
BRIGITA KRASAUSKAITE
In her debut design for Dandelion, Brigita Krasauskaite meditated for two years before and during production on the intersection between where women stand in the culture, and the universality of geometry that has inspired every culture to express the ineffable; finding that expression in the rhythms of Nature that shape the unique landscape of every country, inspiring their artists to pay homage to Nature’s boundarylessness in their art.
The rug Stand: Its inspiration and the artist’s manifesto.
Upon stepping into a mosque in Turkey overflowing with its glorious craftsmanship, I was rudely awakened by the reality of not being able to admire the sumptuous mosaics of the central main dome from within the central prayer space [because it was roped off and…only men can go into that space…] of the architectural masterpiece.
Although my eyes were able to freely travel throughout every angle of the beautifully tiled interior, it was not until they rested upon the enormous rug, with its repetitive pattern, which physically unites the entire space, that I finally was able to stop thinking about the religious restrictions.
Stand was designed using a combination of two contrasting patterns: the opulence of Baroque style ornamentation juxtaposed with the intertwining structure of the mosque’s rug pattern; both superimposed over and seeming to restrain the depiction of three standing female figures uncovered from the waist down.
It is my continued interest in and love of textiles which fueled to my decision to use the medium of floor covering to convey the fact that a rug is one-dimensional; and when standing upon it we are all on one even level. Essentially, we are all equal.
Mother of Rome, delight of Gods and men,
Dear Venus that beneath the gliding stars
Makest to teem the many-voyaged main
And fruitful lands- for all of living things
Through thee alone are evermore conceived,
Through thee are risen to visit the great sun-
Before thee, Goddess, and thy coming on,
Flee stormy wind and massy cloud away,
For thee the daedal Earth bears scented flowers,
For thee waters of the unvexed deep
Smile, and the hollows of the serene sky
Glow with diffused radiance for thee!
On the Nature of Things – Lucretius