Emilija Škarnulytė

I have mostly researched places where contemporary political issues are staged between human and non-human worlds, the shifting boundaries between ecological and cosmic forces – Emilija Škarnulytė

Take a journey across space and time with the work of Lithuanian artist Emilija Škarnulytė.

Her immersive film installations blur myth and science, the personal and the political, the deep time of geology and the brief span of human history. Weaving together visions of the future with echoes of the past, they move fluidly from dreamlike speculation to the stark realities of the climate crisis.

Škarnulytė traverses spaces that we cannot readily see: a Cold War submarine base; a decommissioned nuclear power plant; an oxygen deprived ocean ‘dead zone’; an imagined deep-sea data storage centre. Taking the perspective of a ‘future archaeologist’, she presents these sites as relics of an extinct humanity after ecological collapse. In some films, Škarnulytė embodies the form of a mermaid as she swims through various bodies of water. A practised free-diver, she explores the limits of human endurance.

Škarnulytė looks to ancient legends and modern technology to create new mythologies for a planet in crisis. In doing so, she reflects on our place in society and the natural world as we navigate processes of evolution and extinction.

This film follows Aldona, the artist’s grandmother, who became blind in 1986, the year of the Chornobyl nuclear disaster. Doctors believed this was caused by radiation carried in the air from Chornobyl to Lithuania.

Aldona navigates Grūtas Park in Lithuania, an open-air museum of Soviet statues removed from public spaces. She feels the sculptures with her hands and hears distant Soviet-era music coming from speakers in the park. For Škarnulytė, ‘Aldona, like the blind prophet Tiresias in the Greek play Oedipus Rex, is touching both the past and the present’. The film invites us to consider how alternative means of sensory perception beyond sight – touch, hearing, taste, smell – can offer ‘a different way of seeing’.

The work is shown under a fragrant ceiling of dried plants. Some of these were collected from around the Gerdašiai Entomological Reserve near Aldona’s home, which lies between Lithuania and Belarus on NATO’s eastern border. This tense frontier zone is the native habitat of medicinal herbs dearly loved by Aldona. The plants serve as a reminder of hardship but also carry hope of recovery.

The circular space was inspired by the Metonic cycle, a 19-year lunar calendar period. It also recalls the Neolithic stone circles Škarnulytė explored in Cornwall. Reflecting on Celtic myths of these sites being portals between spiritual worlds and our own, the circle contains a sequence of films that transport us below the surface or back through time.

Hypoxia 2023 reveals the expanding ‘dead zones’ of the Baltic Sea, where human-induced oxygen depletion has rendered life unsustainable. The work exposes a seabed shaped by pollution, industrial waste and Cold War relics. Škarnulytė links this submerged world to the modern myth of the Baltic Sea anomaly and the ancient Lithuanian legend of the goddess Jūratė’s underwater amber palace.

Aphotic Zone 2022 is named after depths of the sea that sunlight cannot reach. Filmed off Costa Rica four kilometres below the surface, it follows scientists seeking a coral species resistant to climate change. The soundtrack was recorded in Mexico City on the 500th anniversary of the fall of the Aztec capital Tenochtitlán. For Škarnulytė, the film is ‘a meditation on the violence of both ecological and colonial conquest’.

Riparia 2023, meaning ‘of the riverbank’, follows the Rhône between Switzerland and France, examining the river as a boundary, a living entity and a site of human belief. Two serpent-like figures glide through industrial waters. They were inspired by Lithuanian archaeologist and anthropologist Marija Gimbutas’s research into Neolithic goddess figurines, one of which appears at the end of the film.

Sunken Cities 2021 charts the Roman city of Baiae, submerged by centuries of volcanic activity. Škarnulytė describes the work as a ‘visual meditation on the persistence of change’.

Made during an artist’s residency at Porthmeor Studios, this silent work traverses a spectrum of time from the Neolithic period to the Space Age.

It features Cornish menhirs and other standing stones including Mên-an-Tol and Lanyon Quoit, shown through 16mm film footage and drawings made with ground stone minerals, plankton water, oils, volcanic sediments, mustard pigments, and sea salt. These alternate with animations of the satellite Telstar I and footage of Goonhilly Earth Station on the Lizard, Cornwall, which in 1962 received the first transatlantic television broadcast via Telstar I.

These glass works echo the Lithuanian myth of a mermaid-like sea goddess, Jūratė. After she falls in love with a human, her father destroys her palace and kills her lover. When pieces of amber wash up on Baltic shores, they are called Jūratė’s tears.

For Škarnulytė, amber represents a link between ‘mythic past and material present. Glass becomes its contemporary analogue, transformed through heat and pressure, transparent yet impenetrable. In these weeping mermaid’s tears, planetary processes collide with oceanic mythologies, transforming emotional experience into physical form.’

This wall focuses the gaze on microscopic marine creatures in the seas around us. As they unfold and emerge across the wall, they form patterns that echo currents, sediment lines and subtle transitions found in shifting ecological zones

This compilation of works is shown across the small screens around the space. These include extracts from Circular Time: For Aleksandra Kasuba 2023 and various drawings made with natural materials that consider ‘the earth as both subject and medium’. The title references the Merry Maidens stone circle in Cornwall.

A central work is Sofija 2025, which comprises footage Škarnulytė has gathered over time. It features wetlands, coastlines and ancient sites, ‘places where mythology and geology intersect’. The work draws on Mikalojus Konstantinas Čiurlionis, a Lithuanian artist, composer and writer who was a key early influence on Škarnulytė. It is dedicated to Čiurlionis’s wife, Sofija, who was a writer and prominent public figure.

Škarnulytė: ‘When I saw Čiurlionis’s painting Rex (1909), I felt it was more than just an image – it was a vision of an entire world. The arcs he etched seemed to bend instinctively, already curving toward the gravitational pull of the planet I was imagining, the ancient glow of amber, the silent pressure of deep-sea currents.’

The Code 2024 depicts a motif of intertwining snakes. Two pythons braid together into a double-helix strand of DNA and then break apart. Played on constant loop, this animation suggests the ‘ouroboros’ symbol of a snake biting its own tail, representing cycles of creation and destruction

The projection on the end wall shows works exploring human and non-human hybrids, threatened ecosystems, and the ruins of lost civilisations both ancient and modern.

In Æqualia 2023, the artist becomes a ‘chimera’ – half fish, half human – as she swims the Brazilian Amazon. She glides through the Rio Solimões’s milky-white waters and the Rio Negro’s dark currents, which meet but resist merging. Nearby, pink river dolphins (botos) navigate by echolocation. The work presents the river as a living metaphor for interdependence that extends beyond species boundaries.

Rakhne 2023 envisions a future data centre under the sea, using computer imagery and AI-generated sound. The work reflects on the unsustainability of data storage in the present.

In t ½ 2019, incorporating Sirenomelia 2017, the artist appears as a siren archaeologist. In a post-extinction future, she guides us through the remnants of human civilisation. Locations include the Etruscan Necropolis of Cerveteri in Italy; the Ignalina Nuclear Power Plant in Lithuania; the Super-Kamiokande neutrino observatory in Japan; the Duga radar in Ukraine; and a Cold War submarine base in Norway. To film the Norwegian scenes, Škarnulytė swam in 4°C water, enduring the cold conditions ‘where objects made by humans will remain for tens of thousands of years’.

Circular Time: For Aleksandra Kasuba 2023 is a tribute to Lithuanian-American artist Kasuba, whose visionary architectural experiments spanned from the 1960s onwards.