Knots of the Moirai
As a designer and researcher, I am drawn to studying my own history and heritage. Partially because I am proud of it, but also because I am trying to understand the lineage of the events in the middle of which I exist. Looking for formats and languages to tell different parts of history and make it relevant today is my way of untying knots.
“Lovatiesės audinys,” Klemensas Čerbulėnas, Lithuanian National Museum of Art, CC BY-NC-ND.
While Lithuania was under the russian imperial rule (1795–1914), my great-great-grandmother lost her lands to russian settlers, who were relocated to take over farms and houses and destabilize the local population. As she fled to the house of her sisters, she took what was most valuable and easiest to carry – embroidered textiles, – and buried ceramics and glassware, hoping to return to her property. The lands were never given back and the valuables never found. A few of the textiles, however, have made their way into my hands. Now over 100 years old, they look fragile and worn. Their shape is odd and their purpose unclear, but the care put into the embroidery still signifies that the towels are objects of value. The value must have been clear to my great-grandmother when she hid the textiles as family and community members were being deported to Siberia; to my grandmother when she stored them in wooden chests as the communist army attempted to take over farms yet again; and to my mother when she moved them to Vilnius during her generation’s fight for independence.
The threads that the Fates and my great-great-grandmother wove seem so fragile, but the verdict that they represent is strikingly different – a permanent life sentence for generations to come. I use the patterns of the textiles to engrave steel; they loose their fragility and become more like knots or runes, requiring untangling or deciphering. This seems more appropriate to the meaning they carry.