Birutė Stulgaitė: “Amber is testing my artistic ambitions.It says: “I am”. When I hear its intonation, I examine the colour, transparency, design and shape, I can touch it – just help it be. “
Birutė Stulgaitė, one of the best-acclaimed Lithuanian jewellers, has established a style close to the principles of Minimalism. B. Stulgaitė subtly feels the peculiarities of material which determined her outlook on amber. As the artist put it, amber “accepts” silver unwillingly, it comes into contact with the materials of organic nature in a much easier way. “I ask what it wants…”, the artist aptly explained her relationship with amber. A plain piece of amber of a pretty strange shape might have wished the artist to put a small wooden stick into its hollow spot – and it became a brooch. B. Stulgaitė turned black amber, rich like a ploughed field and “heavy” like primary matter, into the beads of an ellipsis form, linking its segments with horse-hair. In her works, amber provokes associations with the primary state of the world – it is a witness to the world that existed millions of years ago. While disclosing such associations, the artist makes an attempt to match amber with materials which were created in pre-civilized times not by a man but by nature. She fixes amber adornments to a leather band or makes a necklace or earrings with amber from the sea grass processed in a special way, preserving the elasticity of the grass. The artist successfully matches grinded or polished, so to say, “civilized” but not natural amber with metal: a radiating clear piece is accentuated by a gilded thin wire through a subtle stroke, and the contours of the lustreless flat amber brooch are emphasized by thin silver edgings. B. Stulgaitė trusts the decorative beauty of a piece of amber, and her hand skilfully touches only those places which need to be touched to a certain extent. This peculiarity imparts simplicity and harmony of a refined taste to her adornments. The 1999 solo exhibition by the female artist is one of the key events in the development of Lithuanian amber jewellery. According to the art critic A. Aleksandravičiūtė, “The jewellery of B. Stulgaitė always has existential parameter, while amber, by its nature encapsulating a frozen moment in the existence of Nature, is a perfectly suited matter for this purpose. The artist perceives transparency of amber as purity, values and accentuates this symbolical feature above all.”