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Like a jellyfish in the sun
Installation together with artist Aleksejs Beļeckis
Sound by Sarma Gabrēna
Curator Antra Priede
@Savvaļa, Drusti
5.07.25 — 10.08.25“Like a Jellyfish in the Sun” is a sensual, ritual space - an experience of in-betweenness and transition, where the viewer is invited to transcend the visible and invisible boundaries, becoming a participant in the process of transformation. It is a place where nature and man meet not hierarchically, but in dialogue - between sun and shadow, shell and light, between life and decay. The title of the exhibition - Like a Jellyfish in the Sun - becomes a metaphor for this existential liminal space, where the fragile, the changing, the living and the disappearing appear.
Laimdota Malle, Aleksejs Beļeckis and Sarma Gabrēna work with subtle signs of transformation - shell, fragility, moisture, drying, growth and decomposition. Care is an essential part of this work, not as romanticised ecology, but as acceptance: sometimes form can fail, colour can burn, sound can disappear. It is not control over the process, but participation in it.
Through painterly gestures, performative elements, material transformations and sound space, a mythical "Savvaļa Temple" is created in which a cycle of rebirth takes place. The space is perceived as a shrine of dawn - a reference to the ancient H₂éwsōs, the goddess of dawn, and the Latvian Austra - symbolising man's constant striving for growth, transformation and rebirth. It explores feminine materiality - caring, carrying life, initiating possibilities - while also recognising the potential for failure, decay, decay as a necessary part of the cycle.
The installation works as a liminal space: neither here nor there - not yet and not anymore. It becomes a symbolic threshold to cross in order to enter a new world where the boundaries between the "natural" and the "human" are not clear. Here things are transformed - into spills, into stagnation, into the cries of whales, into fields of daisies being cut - all part of the cyclical cooperation and conflict between nature and a man. Painting meets material wisdom, light meets movement, the living meets memory, song meets scratching.
The space becomes a place where time stands still and resurrection is experienced before it begins - where loss has not yet occurred, but peace has already arrived. It is a place where one can see one's own vanishing essence, let it flow like light through water. It offers not answers, but the possibility to experience - like a jellyfish in the sun - transparent, vulnerable, full of life, exposed to the light and its devastatingly healing power.
Photographed by Aleksejs Beļeckis
