Artist Ieva Jurjāne’s watercolour paintings in the series “Nature is Silent” were created in 2015/2016, and the book “Nature is Silent” includes 23 of them. The paintings are supplemented with photos capturing the work process as well as Ieva Jurjāne’s notes and an essay by art historian Elīna Sproģe.
Encounters with nature are used intuitively to compensate for the fragility of human existence, existential questions and varying levels of despair. Maddening questions demand answers. Nature meets you with silence. This silence occassionally rejects, but sometimes also accepts and welcomes. A person’s longing makes them search for a different scale of reference. In reality people place their small-scale “I” within a context that provokes larger or smaller connections. A trip to the mountains, to a desert or under water is an opportunity to be reborn with new senses. A “still life” is always a specially organized construction. The miniaturization of people in relation to the elements of Nature creates a grotesque overemphasis. By looking at that which is visible for a prolonged period, paradoxically expansive associations emerge. The opportunity to direct the process of staging the composition is tempting – like the presumption of being able to control one’s own human nature and life. In playing with the fragile porcelain figures, scenes in the theatre of life and death are revealed. Examining that which is visible helps one ponder the expanse and limitations of existence. The figures are humans in their naked essence, with nothing extraneous. As playfully as myths, they come into contact with the mythology of Nature. The meeting is tempting, beautiful and frightening. And ironical. Nature is silent, perhaps motionless for a minute, before swallowing these human forms, or maybe permitting them to merge with the “basic elements” of eksistence in mutual harmony and love. The silence of nature provokes humans to hear. The silence of nature includes everything within itself.
Ieva Jurjāne
