Laura Pavilionytė. Exhibition “Kaip tapti laimingu” / “How to become Happy”

„How to become Happy”

Searching for happiness, floating, travelling, wandering in order to find the right way forms a metaphor of knowledge and contemplation of life herewith.

Happiness – a subjectively experienced state, which encompasses different values in itself, which depend on a person’s world perception and time. However, it is always interrelated with destiny and its challenges.

In antique Lithuanian stories the goddess Laimė (which stands for happiness, in English) is mentioned. It is reffered to as a master of success in life. She was believed to be an assistant of the main destiny goddess Laima. The goddess Laima has been worshiped since the stone age as a primordial source of fecundity and a protector of all life forms on earth, determiner of a destiny having power from the moment of birth of any life form.

The goddess Laimė (or Dalia) is regarded as a supervisor of a human life. She was usually asked for happiness, destiny. Young men who managed to steal her feathers (she had a shape of a duck or a swan) could get a wife, destined for them, and the life that couple was determined to be happy.

Today Laimė is associated with winning, luck in lotteries and values, blistering in gold. Often things like that guarantee success, happiness and trust in oneself for a person of today. Representative persons in the society are the ones, who can easily afford luxurious houses, journeys, things, men and women, etc.

Threads in a ball symbolize a human destiny and its ways of life. Travelling by following a thread of wool, which is reconstructed using artistic actions, emphasize the meaning of the process itself – a search for happiness, contemplation about happiness, a search for knowledge of entity.

Ornamental compositions of wool threads twisting as lines, reconstruct very archaic labyrinths. Centers of these ornaments are connected with outside by short ways of the same length, without any crossroads or any chance of possibility to choose. From a distance they remind of a different from current, unusual perception of time, based on repetition of nature cycles.

This creation of art makes us look at those powers of universe, which do not depend on our will. The aim is to show that art is not superior to nature, but is equivalent to reality.