Morta Jonynaitė (b. 1995) is a contemporary Lithuanian artist working with textiles and installation. Her works bring together queer histories, daily life, fungal networks, and systems of interdependence using textile techniques related to the body and handmaking. Jonynaitė engages with weaving as a slow process grounded in tradition while remaining open to contemporary re-interpretation.
The artist spends five or six hours a day at the loom. Starting from a broad subject or narrative, she translates one idea into a series of pieces which form an overall installation. While her hands repeat the same movements, her thoughts are free to wander elsewhere, and connections form between things that initially seemed unrelated. Weaving in her practice is a way of holding memory within unstable social and environmental conditions, and thinking through the complex conditions of the present.
Weaving as Thinking
Jonynaitė engages with the limitations imposed by handweaving rather than resisting them. During the long time it takes to create one piece, the process influences the result. Entering ‘trance mode,’ or even boredom while weaving1, day-to-day thoughts and observations can lead to unexpected twists in the narrative, which make their way into the final artwork. The artist has emphasised the visible traces of this time-consuming process in her work: “completion suggests closure, and I prefer permeability.”2
Weaving for her is a process of constant problem-solving. With so many small but important steps, so much planning involved, and so many moving pieces, a lot can go wrong at any point while working on a loom. Physical strength is required to press the treadles and slide the shuttle across a large loom, and mental strength is required to deal with what pops up in your head when your hands are busy elsewhere. The work is repetitive, physical and often painful — at the doctor’s office, Jonynaitė is treated as a professional sportswoman.
It is also a solitary process. In the past, weaving was carried out within a community: weavers would gather in rooms filled with looms to work together. In these spaces, gossip and laughter would spread as women prepared warps and wound thread onto shuttle bobbins. The act of setting up a loom had a ceremonial aspect and was performed by generations of women supporting each other, now performed by Jonynaitė alone in her studio.
The artist reflects on the social history of weaving in Shed Skins (2024), a triptych of handwoven pieces resembling garments. Two of them hang from wooden tongues carved by a woodworker in collaboration with the artist; the last one lies on the floor as if taken off in haste. The installation evokes a moment of arrival: coats removed, defences lowered, strangers becoming companions. Yet it also points to the bodies that once filled these clothes, now missing. In this sense, the work oscillates between longing for connection and a sense of loss, highlighting the solitary nature of contemporary weaving — a domain that was once sustained by collectivity.
Everyday Objects
Displaying textile work through installations allows it to engage with architectural spaces and the histories they carry. ‘Textiles need to be in space to become active,’ the artist tells me. This sensitivity to context extends to the everyday conditions in which textile objects normally exist.
Jonynaitė understands that people usually care more about and relate to simple, everyday stories and ideas than to big philosophical concepts. Textiles, like the towels she wove for her Never Drying Towels series (2023), wouldn’t normally be displayed flat against the white walls of a gallery. Hung over railings and off kitchen hooks, available for use to dry dripping hands at any moment, these objects were never meant to be experienced outside their usual home setting.
The artist intentionally uses white and pale colours, so the pieces can soak up light, dirt and debris. This way, she can emulate signs of wear that would typically appear on textiles with daily use. Jonynaitė doesn’t want her work — though displayed in the gallery — to be viewed as more sacred than it really is. Until very recently in human history, every textile anyone ever used was made by hand, and as utilitarian objects, people were not afraid to get them dirty. The utility and materiality of textiles form the foundation of her artistic process.
Her attention to traces, wear, and the accumulation of time also extends to the way hidden ecological and social systems are presented in her work. One of the issues raised by Jonynaitė is the family and its models that extend beyond the traditional understanding, here metaphorically represented by domestic textiles — objects once so ubiquitous to Lithuanian culture and identity. Through remaking these everyday objects, she explores alternative stories and ideas they can convey. In B + J (2023), for example, she embroidered the names of a lesbian couple onto a pair of handwoven towels, referencing the history of towels as part of wedding dowries to address contemporary issues of queer life in Lithuania today.
Underground Lives
Jonynaitė’s work highlights untold histories of resilience through a social and ecological lens, using textile techniques to tell stories of survival in difficult conditions. Rather than focusing on dominant narratives, she is drawn to the systems that sustain life from the margins — whether it’s fungal networks beneath the forest floor or stories that remain hidden within domestic spaces.
During the Verpėjos residency in Dzūkija in 2021, the artist created an installation reflecting on the mycorrhizal systems sustaining forest life despite artificial monoculture and clear-cutting. The work was presented at the last train station on the Lithuanian border, where people are entangled in broader networks of migration and geopolitical exchange. Created using a simple netting technique, the installation linked what Jonynaitė describes as ‘the stories of the place and the visitors’ into a network of their own.3
While the above project examined similarities between the forms of interdependence found in both the natural and human worlds, the artist later turned her attention to hidden relationships existing in the domestic sphere. In her solo exhibition Light Rain with Big Drops, held at Drifts Gallery in Vilnius in 2024, she explored stories of the often unseen labour and resilience associated with it. Through the large woven piece, Miglos Str., she re-created a domestic space using elements of a house. Walking around the installation, visitors encounter both the outside and the inside of the structure, discovering possible stories of its inhabitants.
The work reflects on the historical experiences of women whose roles were often confined to the home. Inside, two curtains hang by the windows — the Chimeras. The mythological beasts are woven into a stretched net and framed by delicate hand-crocheted borders. At first glance, they seem charming, guarding the women confined within the four walls. Yet their presence suggests that beneath the home’s charm lies a more troubling reality. Perhaps there is another possibility, maybe the women are beasts themselves — beings with otherworldly powers of survival, enduring despite the constraints imposed upon them?
Whether in the form of fungal networks, women’s histories, queer experiences or local folklore, beneath Jonynaitė’s works runs an interest in hidden lives and forms of connection. She examines relationships that remain unseen, yet profoundly shape the worlds above them. Through textiles, especially weaving, she can give those often-overlooked entanglements a material language, making visible the threads that connect people, places and histories.
BIO
Morta Jonynaitė is an artist based in Vilnius, Lithuania. She graduated in 2020 from the TxT (text, theory, textile) program at Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam. Her work has been shown in various group and solo exhibitions in Lithuania, France, Estonia and the Netherlands, including at MO Museum in Vilnius (2025, 2026), Art Rotterdam (2025), Tallinn Art Hall Lasnamäe (2023), and FITE – Le Festival International des Textiles Extraordinaires in Clermont-Ferrand (2022). She was a recipient of the Lithuanian Council for Culture Stipendium in 2021 and 2024. Morta has also been working for several years as a costume designer in the film industry, providing inspiration for her fine art practice.
1. https://echogonewrong.com/networks-nodes-and-texts-an-interview-with-the-artist-morta-jonynaite/
2. https://www.theknottyones.com/blogs/news/women-craft-morta-jonynaite-on-structure-discipline-and-permeability
3. https://echogonewrong.com/networks-nodes-and-texts-an-interview-with-the-artist-morta-jonynaite/
