Entering the exhibition, two large silk collages intertwine ghostly narratives with botanical history. These photographic fabric prints layer pressed plant specimens from the herbarium at London’s Natural History Museum with archival photographs and documents of spectral stories tied toVictorian glasshouses. The selections are not random, they all depict plants such as the Mandrake, Mugwort, Pheasant’s Eye and Daffodil, each with a history of shifting cultural significance, once revered for their medicinal or mystical properties, only to be later dismissed as weeds. These botanical specimens merge with faded portraits and eerie traces of the past, referencing folklore, literature, and film, where the boundaries between the living and the spectral blur. We see glimpses of these plants appearing in iconic artworks, films and literature such as John Millais’s Ophelia, The Day of the Triffids and Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

In the next room, an unsettling short video introduces us to a delicate plant stalk adorned with eyes, modeled after the haunting figure of Saint Lucy from Francesco del Cossa’s 15th Century painting. In a visual style reminiscent of Czech animations for children, the eyes of Lucy (voiced by Lithuanian actress Bernadeta Lukošiūtė) narrate a brief history of the presence of so-called ‘weeds’ in human life, from the mention of ‘thorns and thistles’ in Genesis through to the Victorian obsession with plant-hunting. Their focus is on who and what determines one to be a weed, and how Empire expansion led to a Gothic fantasy of plants as exoticised and fetishised Others.

Following these draped collages into the next gallery, they now become reference to theatre curtains or backstage partitions, as we hear the voice of an actor drawing us closer. Seated in what appears to be an abandoned theatre or cinema and dressed in an extravagant plant-like costume they recount stories of their acting career across stage and screen. Their specialty is playing the weed and their desirability as an actor is based on the fickle tastes of directors and audiences. They are an Outsider, an Other, and find their home amongst the resilient peers thriving on the margins. Remaining slippery, the film slides from this monologue into a series of increasingly hallucinatory vignettes, Gothic tales of sentient plants, vengeful ghosts and a theatre set ablaze. Our actor inhabits the role of narrator, recounting these stories to an empty theatre before giving way to the ghosts of the architecture in what becomes something close to a haunting, Lynchian dream.

Living in times characterised as the end of the world, The Unloved is an exploration of identity, transformation, and the resilience of the overlooked, inviting audiences to see beauty in the tenacity of what is often dismissed or despised.
Exhibition text from Atletika, Vilnius, 2025