Laura Garbštienė

Laura Garbštienė is an interdisciplinary artist and the founder and curator of artist run initiative Verpėjos (The Spinners). Her work features a humorous institutional critique, the development of ecological themes and a critical approach to consumerism. She completed her MA studies in Textile Arts at the Vilnius Academy of Arts in 2000. Garbštienė’s work belongs to various collections.

Her Film about an Unknown Artist (2009) received FIPRESCI Prize at the Oberhausen International Short Film Festival. In 2024, she was awarded the highest award of the Ministry of Culture of Lithuania – the Honorary Badge “Carry Your Light and Believe”.

In my art practise I work with sheep. When I lived in the city I was working with video and photography. When I moved to live in the woods, I feel free to be not connected to any art scene patterns of ways to work. I find so meaningful to take my sheep to graze every day, to grow my garden and maintain my hut. Sheep leads me to places and discoveries.

I learned to spin their wool into yarn, in that way I am connected to their bodies. I am not longer connected to industry chain, but I am embraced with the endless ritual of process of transforming alive substances – sheep eat surplus of vegetation, I am spinning of never stopping grow of wool.

I met the last shepherd with goats in 2010 in Lithuania. I was so impressed by this encounter, the image staid very long in my head. We had punctuated passing of traditional knowledge of shepherding caused of political circumstances.

I think the best is to learn from sheep, meadows and birds – they live in cycles and therefore with repetition, never forget who they are and how they perform.

While going with my sheep every day through the forest clearings and sheep enjoy eating excess of coppice and branches I started wood carving during my shepherding.

Knife-blades Slowly Synchronising, exhibition ant wood carving workshop, Gallery “Atletika”, 2019

This exhibition is about scale and excess. How much we as humans actually need. In present environment we are still taught to consume, however if we had to make the things we need by ourselves, we would perceive them by completely different measures of time and labor.

In this exhibition particular attention is paid to the process – here it becomes a unit of measure. I therefore encourage to delve into action by inviting to the workshop of wood carving. The process becomes the most important element in the relationship between us and objects.

I kept spinning wool daily during winter months. In 2017 I decided to gathered artists and non artists to learn together the craft of spinning wool for the first time.

We felt like an anti-capitalist movement that can unite people from diverse cultural backgrounds.

The craft was dead already at least 50 year ago, but I traveled across Lithuania to find traces practising people.

Spinner’s Orchestra, 2018- 2019

The orchestra is formed every time in different places from different people. We invite people who want to learn how to spin wool and have their own spinning wheels to join the orchestra.

While learning how to spin, we listen to each other, sounds of wheels, and it’s different kind of communication, like a ritual, that unites people from diverse cultural backgrounds. The final public performance is initiation into community of spinners.

I’m a Bark Beetle, exhibition at Marcinkonys Station gallery, 2021

On solidarity. I continuing spinning wool and dyeing with local plants and mushrooms.

In the area the last traditional weavers just passed away and environmentalists are fighting bark beetles in the forests.

The exhibition consist of a forest that comes from the body parts of sheep but at the same time is my own footprint, stretched over time. 

And a weaver, whose work, the process of weaving, is in itself important and valuable, disconnected from economic, ethnographic, or scientific values, just like a bug, eating wood, commonly known as a bark beetle, does not serve any higher purpose. It’s just there.

And a weaver, whose work, the process of weaving, is in itself important and valuable, disconnected from economic, ethnographic, or scientific values, just like a bug, eating wood, commonly known as a bark beetle, does not serve any higher purpose. It’s just there.

I’m a Bark Beetle, 2022

Publisher: Lithuanian interdisciplinary art association.

The fragments of images and diary entries on the pages of the book convey the cyclical flow of nature’s changes and testify to the possibility of interspecies solidarity and cooperation.

Septenary Rainbow With Some Shades Missing, 2022

I am weaving on traditional home loom my spun wool using setting of patterns left from someone. I am continuing slow work of someone passed away long time ago.

Shepherds’ Residency in cooperation with Nida Art Colony and the Curonian Spit National Park, 2021

I send my sheep for holiday season to the sea instead of going to artist residency myself. It was first time I shared my time with sheep with other artists.

Forest sheep, 2023

Publisher: Kirvarpa. The book was created with Kornelija Žalpytė in the context of the Lithuanian Pavilion at the 18th International Architecture Exhibition “La Biennale Architettura 2023” in Venice

The story of sheep who were send to stay at the forest retreat but all summer wandered alone near by.