Engaging with large found objects, building others, struggling with the laws of physics. This is how Lithuanian artist Džiugas Šukys conceives of sculpture, embracing the challenge and repeating the effort over and over.

My name is Džiugas Šukys.That is all there is to it.

'(Un)Finished Ideas': The video shows my interaction with self made or found objects,

which are later used for an installation.

When I was just a little kid, I remember drawing all kinds of things – motifs of the animated movies on television, sights that I saw around me, intuitive visions. It happened by my own free will, with no interventions from my family or my surrounding. To this day, this seems insanely strange to me. How can a person at a very young age (about 3-5 year-old) show what he is or what he wants to be in the future? Sometimes I wonder whether it is a coincidence or if it was all planned from the beginning by someone; that I am what I am. I haven't found the answer yet, but that doesn't faze me. I'm very glad that I, from my heart’s content, am capable of doing what I do now, including gaining support and attention from relatives and the public that surround me.

My work is not conceptually difficult, but I am aware that sometimes it is hard to understand everything concerning my work visually. I am often asked ‘what is that?’ and I respond, ‘it is something for you to become anxious about, at the very least’. My works are about the problems that concern me the most. However, they can definitely be widely interpreted by the audience. They talk about my experience, my self-perception, my environment, and even daily situations. I often try to discover what is seemingly invisible to the naked eye, but felt or perceived as vibrations in our surroundings. One example could be uncontrollable or untouchable fears and perturbations, like when I feel tension and anxiety because of some simple domestic matters. Perception: that something invisible is going on around me or within me, that irritates me, in a good way of course, that's why I just can't turn away. I try to muster all of this into my works, they become a long incoherent narrative about my experience, 'about me (with no end, for now).

My works are also full of desire to give meaning to things that seemingly might look insignificant. I often put lots of effort into simple matters such as moving a self-made or found object from its place, inhaling or exhaling as much as my body allows me to, or just verifying whether something that I came up with is possible to do or not. All of these things functions as an inner engine in my creative works.

‘(Un)finished Ideas’ for example, has four parts: a video documentation, a large scale drawing and two objects. The video shows my interaction with self made and found objects, which are later used for an installation. The drawing in this work can be interpreted as a plan, something that shows the way things should be done. What is the intention? It is drawn. In the drawing the concrete ingot is shown to be lifted --put on a wooden construction or on a wrapping tape, etc. But in the installation the ingot was manipulated differently, and the same goes for the tree log. The idea behind this disorientation or inability to do something the right way becomes the ability to stop when it is necessary. Is it really so desperately important to do something right according to a previous plan?  That is for the individual to decide. I see a lot of significance in activities that have multiple routes to grow or evolve, maybe into something better than what may have been thought of first.

'Set #3': The idea of this work is to give meaning to the absurd. 

By organizing the cubes in different variations I’m trying to merge physically difficult, mentally deteriorating, routine-like actions, with abstract forms of significance.

'Non-Collapsing': This video performance is showing the collision between me and a found object.

Here is what friend and colleague Victoria Damerell wrote about my work:

“The artist is interested in hanging, suspension motives. A suspension motive is not obvious but implied in a fragile balance of tin cubes put on top of each other or hung from the ceiling. The plate's vibrating mechanisms, little wheels attached to the concrete block, also seem to be prepared for transportation and suggest being seen as tools for the fixation or generation of the physical world's subtleties…..  it can be suspected that namely physical input, the necessity of will, works like an inner engine for the author…

By rejecting the aesthetic, symbolic and functional aspects in his work, the artist leaves us in a confrontation with pure will. This will has no need for a purpose, or the other way around, the will accepts that the purpose is absurd.

A good example would be the video ‘(Un)finished ideas’, which demonstrates comical and at the same time pitiful collisions between the artist and his own made objects; his impotent attempts to control the collisions somehow. On the other hand, even if the whole installation is filled with pitiful effort, there is no Sisyphus here. Constructions are made, already turned into autonomous pieces of art, and the author withdraws. The sculptor builds up another layer of the myth, imprinting it into concrete. The action is turned into an embodied longing of significance, and it is impossible suppress.”

Lithuanian artist Džiugas Šukys is currently a third year Bachelor's student in the Sculpture Department of the Vilnius Art Academy, in Vilnius, Lithuania.