The artist Dovilė Bernadišiūtė was born in Vilnius but is now based in Stockholm. Her jewellery is made through a process of casting and imprinting interior and exterior surfaces. She wants to establish a connection between the human body and the space around it. Bernadišiūtė has studied jewellery and design at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie, Amsterdam, and the Konstfack University for Arts, Crafts and Design, Stockholm, where she is also working in the Research Lab for jewellery.
Her work has been featured in numerous prestigious exhibitions in the Netherlands, Sweden and other European countries. Her jewellery always reflects through the special crafting process a specific place and preserves memories, even if the place itself vanishes which gives her works also a political significance. Each piece is therefore an individual cast of a place and memory and unites the wearer with them.
Our already complex relationship with space has been further complicated in recent years by the intrusion of technology into the structure of our everyday lives. There is more room than ever for collision between our interior selves vs. exterior worlds, the fluidity of time vs. the solidity of matter and the lasting impacts of our actions vs. the brevity of our lifetimes. Dovilė addresses such conflicts through the creation of mediating objects formed from screens, phones, cameras and eyeglasses; all objects through which we perceive the world.
In Dovilė’s works, these optical forms are contorted through glass-casting or by crushing brittle open-cell aluminium insulation from luxury cars and satellites into dense wearable objects.Much of this work regarding perception has been undertaken in collaboration with Lee Allen Kuczewski, who Dovilė met during an eyeglass-making workshop at the Haystack Mountain School of Crafts in Deer Isle, Maine. As artists they explore humanity’s relationship to our senses and space, how we adorn ourselves through mapping experience, and discovery into how information design affects us. The genesis of their collaboration began with human vision as a foundational theme, and though seeing remains central to their work, both computational software and data have opened up interactivity beyond human sight into other senses, allowing for an exploration into a full, inclusive human experience.
