I am a painter. I keep thinking about how to record the landscape without painting it, without recreating it with my vision, my gesture. What is the landscape itself? How to let the landscape happen on paper? How to capture the landscape as it is? It is precisely the authenticity of the landscape through light and time that interests me.

I also use chemical processes to make the landscape happen: Balt Salt silver and cyanotype processes. I hide the chemically coated leaves from the light to deliberately pull them out later. They record local light faster. I put sheets of paper or canvas in my backpack pocket, walk, stick them in the sand, stick them behind the local fence, watch and wait, and stop.

The theme of land or landscape has "arrived" and has not yet disappeared from the theme about grandparents, about a mother, who was born in Siberia. The land travelled together with the land of grandparents, great-grandparents; the place they were taken to without asking, just picked up and moved. My mother was born there, her father stayed there forever, my grandfather, whom I never saw. A land that I have not seen but heard a lot about: mountains, Baikal, flowers... This is the search or imagining of that unseen Earth as it could be, understanding the importance of capturing a documentary image of the place where I am.

Agnė Jonkutė was born on August 5, 1974 in Kaunas, and in 1997-2003 graduated in Painting at the Kaunas Faculty of Fine Arts at the Vilnius Academy of Arts. Since 1999, she has participated in exhibitions. She creates drawings, performances, installations and video art, transferring experience from these fields to painting. Her black-and-white paintings are born from the aesthetics of drawings and black-and-white cinema. Minimalism is combined here with many halftones of gray and black alternating light. The cinematic framing of motifs also affects her painting.