Ieva Babilaitė
Randasi*
1 September–7 October 2026
VDA Gallery “5 Malūnai”
Exhibition opening: 1 September, 5 p.m.
Curator: Marija Marcelionytė-Paliukė
I remember sitting next to Ieva at a concert. A moment later, she took out her notebook and began to draw. I remember thinking: how incredibly, impossibly loud her pencil was, and the turning of the page. Louder than a symphony orchestra...
More than thirty years ago, when I was at Šarūnas Sauka’s home, someone asked him what compelled him to paint. Hunched over a huge work in progress, he looked up from under his brow and, barely stirring the air with his index finger as he pointed towards the loft of the wooden house, said: “Every day, I hear the scratching of Nomeda’s brush.”
Ieva is constantly searching for silence, yet it seems she still does not know how loudly she does so.
I wanted her exhibition in my space – a gallery that is never silent, a place people pass through, draughty, open, and complicated. It has no steady rhythm; you cannot impose your own ideal conditions upon it. You simply have to accept it and allow yourself to be curated by it. There is nowhere to hide.
I wanted to draw Ieva – image, sound, unease... – out of those little notebooks and into space, and to create the sense that yes, yes, everything is already there, that the notebooks alone would be enough, but that this would somehow be too simple, too familiar. It would resemble opening an archive when the artist is already sitting on a cloud, swinging their legs, no longer able to edit their notes. I wanted those notebooks to push back the walls of the gallery – and not only its walls.
I have heard that, in certain circumstances, fire can be extinguished with fire more quickly than with water...
*Coming into Being
Ieva Babilaitė is an artist, illustrator, curator, and educator who lives and works in Vilnius. She graduated from the Vilnius Academy of Arts with a Master’s degree in Graphic Art and has also studied art therapy. She is currently an Associate Professor at the Department of Graphic Art at the Vilnius Academy of Arts. She is a member of the Lithuanian Artists’ Association and the Lithuanian section of the International Board on Books for Young People (IBBY). She has held 17 solo exhibitions and participated in numerous group exhibitions in Lithuania, Japan, Italy, the Netherlands, France, Greece, Poland, Belgium, Germany, Ukraine, and elsewhere. She leads creative workshops and educational activities and curates exhibitions devoted to book art. She has illustrated 24 books for children and adults and is both the author and illustrator of several of them. The artistic solutions and originality of her work have been recognised with numerous awards and prizes.
More about the artist:
Instagram — @ibabilaite
www.ievababilaite.art
Facebook — Ieva Babilaitė
The sound-recording device was realised with the assistance of Matas Ibelhauptas.
Special thanks to Ieva Daščioraitė and the Department of Graphic Art for their collaboration.
The exhibition is part of the Vilnius Gallery Weekend programme.
Ieva Babilaitė
Unimagined Drawings
What reveals itself comes into being – an image grown from thought, word, action, sound.
My notebooks are full of illegible scribbles. They can be leafed through, looked at, perhaps even felt – received as sonic impulses tracing curves, encoding rhythm, and becoming drawings. Perhaps I am simply recording. Like the Eurotherm Chessell device recording sound.
A spoken word is sound; the crumpling of paper is sound; the movement of a brush, graphite, or an awl across the surface of paper is sound. The silence between the thick walls of my studio is sound too. The past, given voice through words or images, reaches me like an echo rebounding from the walls of today. A scar that forms in the body, in the mind, and is reflected in the flow of thought – that, too, is sound.
For me, sound is a sign – a boundary, and what comes into being beyond it.
I search for my place among walls, people, sounds, and words. If my place seems incomprehensible or out of place to someone else, to me it is my own. It is what it is. Before, I could only sense that I was close to what is; now I can see it. The image arrives before the thought.
There are things I do not understand. I can only try to depict them, assign them a symbol, choose the direction of a line, its thickness, the depth of black. I name a thought, a feeling, as though groping in the dark – with a graphite pencil or an awl. Sometimes a profusion of lines takes shape as a tangle of thoughts, which I keep tangling and trying to untangle, both in my mind and on paper. This is how I live – almost understanding, but feeling my way through. And sometimes clear thoughts take shape too.
It is like a game played according to rules I have invented myself: trying to guess which path to take so that the final image becomes what it already is.
The drawing is created using 4B, 6B, and 8B graphite pencils. It consists of several layers: the first is incised into the paper, like an obstacle to the line and to thought; the second is covered with ink; the third is graphite pencil once again.
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