Lina Jonikė is one of the best-known contemporary textile artists in Lithuania, whose main form of artistic expression is conceptual embroidery. By using one of the oldest decorative textile techniques the artist presents for our appreciation newly created (embroidered) stories, interpretations and identities of time-frozen images (photographs). From the beginning of her artistic career one of Lina Jonikė’s main aims is the search for identity. Key image in the artist’s work is human body, which is compared to an empty canvas on the surface of which its destiny is “painted” by thread stitches. Although combining stitching and photography link all of the artist’s works, some of them, as usual, are embroidered directly onto the canvas, but others create an illusion of a traditional embroidered surface. Here the artist uses translucent sheets of plastic, detached from the photographic image, onto which she embroiders a piece of clothing (cloak, towel, nappy or drapery) covering the naked body – art historian and critic, dr. Virginija Vitkienė
The artist has participated in numerous exhibitions in Lithuania and abroad (Latvia, Germany, Belgium, Ukraine, Slovakia, Portugal, USA) and has held a number of solo shows (Lithuania, Spain, Japan), the latest being in December 2016 at VAA “Titanikas” gallery. L. Jonikė has received many awards. In 2014 in “Best 2013 Art Work” exhibition held at M. K. Čiurlionis National Museum of Art she received an award for Sensitive Memories of a Painful Past (artwork “Old Man I-II”). It is also worth mentioning, that in 1997 at an International Kyoto Exhibition-Competition L. Jonikė received an “ExellenceAward” for her artwork “Arnotas”. The artist is a member of the Lithuanian Artists’ Association. She also actively participates in various national and international projects, gives papers and lectures in Lithuania and abroad.
