Seeing sometimes involves letting go. Watching schools of shiners on a summer evening, Annie Dillard becomes an “unscrupulous observer” in this mode: “I breathed an air like light; […] I was ether, the leaf in the zephyr; I was flesh-flake, feather, bone.”1 Daiga Grantina’s sculptural and phenomenological project likewise awakens seeing that loses itself. Through associative (de)creation and relational assembly that is always attuned to its surrounds, her dissonant yet coherent materialism both rewards and disorients unscrupulous observers. Coactive textures betray the constitution of her interfused materials, rousing Dillard’s kind of seeing that looks alive.
What is a leaf? A shred, a shift, “a leaf is square of both middles,” writes Grantina in a poem accompanying “Leaves,” her second exhibition in Emalin’s sun-lanced gallery. “It is the time corridor that you can feel looking at leaves,” she writes, alluding to Virginia Woolf’s “Time Passes,” the second chapter of her novel To the Lighthouse (1927) and the subtextual lens for the arrayed sculptures. Prefacing the exhibition, the chapter’s excerpted pages and marked-up passages, chosen by writer Daisy Hildyard, occupy a vitrine and wall display. Woolf’s intermedial chapter expands elapsed time between two linear narratives, concentrating on nature’s involvement within the interior of an empty house, while human events remain contracted to parentheses. A decade becomes an evening as nature assumes a consciousness: “little airs” are wisps of venturing wind; light is petalled “like a flower reflected in water”; moonlit trees are “kindling in the gloom of cool cathedral caves.” Air, light, dust, water, petals, shadows, feathers, leaves: all are agents that animate the state of time’s passage, breathing atmospheric organicity through the vacant architecture — a discursive materiality preluding Grantina’s own. Woolf likened her novel to the form of the letter “H” with “Time Passes” forming the crossbar. The chapter enacts a formal ligature akin to a sculptural join, occupying the interspace of transition while fusing two parallel times. Which is to say, every material, whether textual or sculptural, contains its own temporality. Fuses, interspaces, transitions? Leaves grow of themselves that way.
In Rising leaf (all works 2025), arrowed silhouettes of taut string beckon the eye upward while elongating the sensation of passage as one ascends the staircase. Higher still is Pouring and , its folded aluminum foil steadied by gestural stretches of gauzy fabric and silicone that, seemingly natant, infers a liquid plash. Punctuated by a black nub, its titular comma is a virtual threshold upon which the floating arc of Anafi, its husk of polycarbonate as diaphanous as wind, seemingly depends. Light’s fluctuation is an especially animating agent for these sculptures, ensuring the rested and suspended forms refuse conclusiveness. That each is open to light’s interruption, that will make and unmake it, elucidates the works’ conspicuous placement. Orbital, they are situated at varying heights or at awkward corners, aerating space and sanctioning wayward drift so that seeing becomes an outgrowth that confounds as much as clarifies. Flute’s perforated white bar hangs remotely near the staircase’s landing, the wrinkles of its foil-wrapped branch leaking the shiest of lights. Elsewhere, a little tile of yellow-flecked feathers, fixed to an argent twig, is an accent floated in space. Grantina’s awareness of the possibilities latent in the existing architecture enhances her sculptural entities as relational bodies that divide, dissolve, and become undone; like a series of middles or a collection of leaves, they are both individuated and indeterminate.
Ink, branches, wood, fabric, silicone, feathers — these rudimentary materials are handled in ways that sees their formal properties transmute and regenerate, osmosing a polysemy of contradictory qualities. At times, meshes are filamented shadows as plastics are sticky hydrations; at others, ink tumesces as wood liquifies. The sensory porosity of phenomenological experience becomes enhanced as materials speak beyond their substance, its transmission also effected by color. In Crescent life, a curled blade of plywood drops sheerly to a fine tip, meeting the wall in tentative touch. It casts a lengthened shadow as its bleeding-edge shifts from crimson to rose beige to frosted mint to streaked white. “I think colours are linked with a sense of time” Grantina has said. “As it accumulates, tonality becomes a rhythm and can be perceived as a gesture.” Color initiates reverberant movement, shading the work as fleeting or firm, substantial or pliable, intimating Lisa Robertson’s notion that “colour, like a hormone, acts across.”2 The convexity of Fog Saw’s chrysalid is englobed in a cloud of gray. Light sluices the peak of its curve, contouring the oily wrinkles and delicately dented surface of its waxy carapace. The grisaille fields of this ovate form, itself a deft stroke of economy and ellipsis, are elaborated by vertical sheets of fraying metal mesh and air-bubbled silicone whose complex webs of feathered texture hold implausible ripples. Underneath, tonality graduates from a serrated strip of scarlet to a loose pulse of plum, whipped grays, and aeriform lavenders. In its ambiguous, violaceous pallor, Woolf comes into view: “There was a purplish stain upon the bland surface of the sea as if something had boiled and bled, invisibly, beneath.”
Grantina’s embrace of light as sculptural form makes material ludic. It’s these spritzy contingencies mobilized by light that sets phenomenal consciousness aglitter. Gelatinous glares are whirled through seaweedy shreds of plastic; dense glows upon steel are pearled and spatialized; fluke iridescence nuances fronds of metal mesh, its nubilous moiré silvering at the edges. In a chance beam, white light sparked over the creased aluminum sheet of Rocker, making it scintillate with infinitesimal greens, grays, and snaps of pink. These gritty pinks spangled its gleam and were rosed moreover by folded fabric and a swathe of blossomy silicone.
The semiotic glue of description, to say what you see, is sabotaged by Grantina’s fugitive materialism, where appearances can’t be merely accepted. The works’ tactile invitation to get close, to get granular, encourages seeing that returns to the senses. “Look at the leaf,” writes Ian White. “It is yellow. Or red. […] Look at the colour. The colour is real, it is something to do and it can be done.” A leaf’s color can be seen as if for the first time, simply “what is there is not what you saw before.”3 It’s a manner of seeing in plain sight, depending on your willingness to let go.
