DORMANTĖ AND JURGIS PENKINSKI EXHIBITION “THE EARTHEN RICHES”

For many years, Dormantė and Jurgis Penkinski have been known in the world of arts as a creative couple of strong, fighting, persistent and devoted personalities cherishing their values and traditions.

Jurgis Penkinski in his works refers to something archaic through the selected zoomorphic and anthropomorphic shapes. The plastic solutions stem from the meditation of philosophical texts, and the clayware emanates explicit semantics.

Dormantė Penkinski manages to connect the ancient Lithuanian traditions with the Japanese heritage thus interweaving the roots of our culture with the sources of the ancient world cultures thus generating a single live unit. The creation of Dormantė Pekinski brings together history and eternity, ethnicity and mankind, physics and metaphysics.

Dormantė and Jurgis are residing and creating in Gojus Village, in a clay house which they built with their own hands. In the summer of 2004, it was the effort of Dormantė that brought the ancient Japanese ceramics firing tradition to Lithuania. With assistance of Lithuanian artists, Rikio Hashimoto, a master of bidzen ceramics, constructed the first anagama kiln, a single-chamber kiln fuelled with firewood. Recently, the artists have slightly distanced themselves from the anagama while embracing the traditions of bidzen ceramics. This type of Japanese medieval ceramics is denoted by simplicity, moderation, unsophisticated shapes, random fractures and shape deformations.

The birth of artwork is a physically demanding process as the samples are fired for more than a day, and the necessary temperature (going up to 1300 degrees centigrade) is required throughout the process. In Japan, this type of ceramics is considered to be the summit of mastery, a reflection of eternity in the material shape.