Ruta Naujalyte "never"

Ruta Naujalyte is a Lithuanian textile artist specialising in crochet sculptures created with sewing threads. She graduated with a Master’s degree in Textile from Vilnius Art Academy in 2008. Her work explores the tension between fragility and resilience, often embodying a sense of incompleteness as a signature aesthetic. She incorporates magnets into her sculptures, making them subtly interactive. Birds frequently appear in her pieces, serving as metaphors for themes of transformation, vulnerability, and decay.

Her art has been exhibited internationally, including solo shows at Showroom Trofejas (Berlin), clubØ (Oslo), and Artifex Gallery (Vilnius). She has participated in numerous group exhibitions across Europe, the USA, and Asia, with her works displayed in institutions such as Tsinghua University Art Museum (Beijing), Compton Verney Art Gallery (UK), and The Untitled Space (New York).

She has received several prestigious awards, including the XStitch Magazine Contemporary Stitch Award (1st prize, 2023), the BBA Artist Prize (Berlin, 2022), and the Envision Arts “Best in Show” (2020). Her work has been featured in various publications, such as From Threads to Needle and Contemporary Embroidered Art (Thames & Hudson, 2024) and New Bracelets (Nicolas Estrada, 2021).

She currently lives and works in Vilnius.

“Birds, feathers, and the weight of an unseen cage. Dream. Hope. Imagination. Self-worth. How much do they cost? Hard work was supposed to mean something. But when everything is reduced to a transaction, even the body becomes a commodity—something to sell, to exhaust, to discard. Those without wealth must trade themselves, and when there’s nothing left to give, survival slips out of reach. We exist in a system where profit eclipses humanity, where value is measured in numbers, and where life itself is never guaranteed. No one chooses to be born, yet we are told we must earn the right to live.” - Ruta Naujalyte