Interview

Written By Editorial Team

Augustinas Našlėnas

Augustinas is a Lithuanian multimedia artist and designer working in Klaipėda. He creates spiritual contemporary art inspired by ethnoculture.

Augustinas holds a BA in visual communications from the Vilnius Academy of Fine Arts, Lithuania, and an MA in contemporary arts practice from the Sheffield-Hallam University, United Kingdom.

His work is comprised of multimedia installations and performances, as well as drawing and digital imaging. It’s highly informed by the spiritual and magical traditions of various cultures, as well as contemporary psychology and consciousness studies.

Along with working for an advertising agency, Augustinas has developed his own brand of design called Vandenis Media. Through this, he produces branding for musical artists and festivals, creates illustrations for album covers and merchandise, as well as videos and motion graphics for music.

 

What is your background and how did you start your journey in the art world?

“My parents are high school art teachers, so an interest in the arts was programmed into me very early on. After I finished my BA studies in 2008, I immediately left for the West, as many Lithuanians did at that time. I traveled to United Kingdom as a migrant worker and spent 4 years doing odd jobs. My journey eventually led me to Sheffield, South-Yorkshire, where I studied fine arts practice at the Sheffield-Hallam University under professor Penny McCarthy.

I also came across much of what is considered Eastern philosophy. By the time I began my MA, I had already discovered authors like Alan Watts and Eckhart Tolle, familiarized myself with the basics of Buddhism and Taoism, and even tried some practices like Zazen meditation. I was interested in the spiritual practices of different traditions, and this influence started expressing itself in my art. 

During my MA, I began developing a way of combining my spiritual appetite with a contemporary arts practice. After all, the key question for both the artist and the spiritual seeker is the same: who am I? I experimented with automatic drawing and photographic montage as chance-and-accident driven techniques of image-making, until eventually arriving at moving image and sound. Even though my degree show entry consisted of five large format photomontage prints, I already knew that multimedia was to become my new form of expression.”

What inspires you most?

“I get my inspiration from life experience and spiritual evolution. Changing ourselves to overcome inner and outer limitations is a difficult task, and thus psychological and spiritual transformation make the most inspirational stories. I’m greatly fascinated by the journey of the human-animal towards consciousness; the evolution of culture. I find it extraordinary and mysterious that it only took us a few million years from hunting the plains of Africa to a point where we can be sitting here talking about these things. In addition, the books ‘The Mind in the Cave’ and ‘Deciphering Ancient Minds’ by archaeologist David Lewis-Williams, and ‘The Way of the Shaman’ by anthropologist Michael Harner drew my attention to the phenomenon of Shamanism as the primeval source of all human culture.

The cultural and historical significance of places also inspires me, especially the power this significance has over how we experience these places today, and how it can help us transform our relationship with the past.

Good work by other artists is also a huge inspiration. In 2016, I had a chance to see the Bill Viola retrospective show at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park, which left me speechless and completely convinced in the artistic power of an audio-visual installation.”

What themes do you pursue? Is there an underlying message in your work?

“The main theme in my work is discovery and understanding of oneself. Process of individuation was the theme of my early work, especially during the photomontage period.

In the images shown above of the Gayamycota installation that was held in 2016, I explored archaic values reemerging in the contemporary high-tech culture. This was mainly about the environmental crisis demanding us to start changing our relationship with the environment, and regain the emotional connection to it that our distant ancestors had.

For the Silent Temples installation in 2018-2020, I explored different ways of reconnecting with ancestors and maintaining this connection. I combined location recordings made at 9 Curonian sanctuaries with images of those places and graphics acquired by combining ancient Baltic patterns. It was an 80-minute audio-visual experience.

Overall, the underlying message in my work is that we are as responsible for our inner world as we are for the entire planet.”

“Art has always been around me, and I can’t imagine life without it. I breathe art like air.

Currently, my colleague and I are developing a new project that stems from the Silent Temples background and includes the same location recordings. But this time, it’s going to be more performative and improvised in the moment.

It is called the Living Temples. We’re utilizing social media a lot more this time, making live sessions on Facebook and YouTube where people can witness the creative process as it happens.”

How would you describe your work?

“I’m involved in fine art as well as applied arts. My fine art practice consists of multimedia installations and performances. They are audio-visual experiences raising environmental, historical, or spiritual awareness and promoting transformation towards a higher ideal.

I also work as a digital illustrator and a graphic designer through my brand, Vandenis Media. In 2021, Vandenis Media was commissioned by the Museum of Amber, Palanga, Lithuania to produce an educational animated film for their education center. The film ‘Signs of Baltic Worldview’ explains key concepts of traditional Baltic cosmology by connecting them to traditional folk patterns and signs. This opens a new chapter which I believe will be more about film production.”

Which artists influence you most?

“During my early period, I was mostly influenced by the surrealists. Austin Osman Spare is an obscure British artist of the 1900s whose work has recently been rediscovered. I experimented with his technique of automatic drawing during the first and second year of my MA degree.

I started making photomontages after discovering Max Ernst’s book, Une Semaine de Bonté: A Surrealistic Novel in Collage. It helped me understand the way disparate elements taken from distant contexts can be combined to create a new uncanny reality. In addition, Salvador Dali’s way of combining a hyper-realistic painting style with a subconscious content blew my mind. 

Leonora Carrington is a British artist of the 1900s who fled her upper middle-class home to study art. She was accepted into the surrealist circle and eventually moved to Mexico, where she became one of the country’s most celebrated artists. Her story of personal liberation inspired me. I was also fascinated by the way her art was informed by seemingly distant folk traditions — Irish fairy tales of her childhood and pre-Hispanic Mexican folklore.

Nowadays, I’m mostly interested in artists who attempted to combine traditional forms of art into something new. An example is William Blake, a British artist of the late 1700s who created very cohesive visual art, writing and music that informed and complemented each other. There’s also M.K.Čiurlionis, a Lithuanian composer and artist of the early 1900s whose paintings were highly influenced by his music and vice versa. He wrote about a desire to combine music and images into a new form of higher art. 

Jonas Mekas, a Lithuanian-born American filmmaker was hailed as the godfather of avant-garde cinema. He was an amazing chance-and-accident driven filmmaker. Bill Viola and his way of expressing deep psychological and spiritual themes by means of video and installation is extremely powerful. Seeing his work made me realize that the concept of the ‘work of art’ is shifting, and the future works of art are going to be experiences, immersive multimedia multi-sensory experiences that can be enjoyed personally or collectively.

Steve Roach is an American electronic musician and sonic artist whose work is about taking the listener to deep states of awareness. His shows cross the line to this kind of artistic multi-sensory experience a lot more than a regular music concert ever does.

Finally, Richard Skelton, who is a contemporary British artist. He has a way of combining music and writing into a form of art that feels fresh. His work is fascinating, and I find a lot to learn there.”

 What is your creative process like?

“I balance spontaneity with planning. It takes me a long time—usually a full year—to do all the necessary research and develop an idea.

I need to gather a lot of background information in order to come up with a form that feels solid and refined. Then I select pieces that complement each other and put them together, just like making a montage. This is the spontaneous experimental part. Next comes the part that needs the most planning: the technical work of selecting the gear for the installation, putting it together, making it work the way I need it to, and making sure it is travel ready. This stage also involves planning the events and the logistics of touring.

For instance, when my colleague and I were developing Silent Temples, (see below), we started by gathering lots of factual historical information about the 9 locations. For the experimental part, we repeatedly visited all 9 locations throughout the year and did meditation sessions at each of them, during which I made automatic drawings. I then interpreted signs and symbols that came through these sessions by comparing them with the available information on traditional Baltic symbology. After that, we came back to the same locations to take pictures and record sonic material. The whole process took us from August 2018 up to June 2020.”

What is an artist’s role in society and how do you see that evolving?

“Artists embody the collective imagination of the society. An artist’s role is to bring novel ideas into being, as well as recycle ideas for further use. The artist is responsible for proposing ideas and handing them over to scientists and technologists to test their validity and usefulness for society’s needs.

On the other hand, the artist can also work to raise awareness and connect disparate contexts in order to bring about cultural advance. Proposing a previously unknown or overlooked way of connecting seemingly distant areas of culture is as important as bringing up something entirely new. I see a lot of that going on in the current sci-art movement.

It’s an artist’s responsibility to constantly be on the edge of the unknown, scouting the distance for possible revelations, like a fisherman going out into a stormy ocean. They never know what might happen, but they strive to come back with a fish to feed their family.”

Have you had any noteworthy exhibitions you'd like to share?

“My main exhibitions have been:

2018 - 2021: Silent Temples.

2018: Dream Reaper - The Seeker of Visions.

2016 - Gaiamycota.

2010 - 2012: Requiem For A Post-Soviet Dream.”

 
Editorial Team
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