The Other Places, No. 31 Artwork

In the collection “The Other Places” the author examines the influence of memory processes on the multilayering of space. She uses photographs as a starting point and during the creative process she creates fictional environments in her works. By identifying the period they mark, a sense of recognisable areas is formed in urban landscapes or landscapes. However, cleaning up the environment by erasing a specific image in the background or covering the latter as if by hand-scraped graphite dust merges reality with an archive of the author’s personal experience and memory. In other words, the perception of space varies depending on the viewer imagining its context. Vaiva presents the variation of space suggested by her memory or imagination, although the viewer can create the same or associative space by relating personal experiences that insert other content or reveal other interpretations. In this way, a mythical place is captured, which at the same time is, because it is recognised as concrete, but it is not, because it penetrates through elements that do not exist in reality. Manipulating the impression of remembering space, the artist seeks to emphasise that there is a faint boundary between utopia and heterotopia. An experiment with graphic techniques is a distinctive feature of the artist's work. The author says that this is a niche in the visual arts that is of particular interest to her. In the cycle “Other Places”, the duality of the image characteristic of Vaiva's work is conveyed by combining different ways of transferring the image, monotype, and so on.