Daiga Grantina: What Eats Around Itself

Daiga Grantina creates large-scale sculptural installations that emulate the natural world. Her configurations take on synthetic materials and incorporate conflicting physical qualities: soft and hard, transparent and opaque, mobile and static, strong and weak.

“What Eats Around Itself,” refers to the dynamic properties of lichen, a composite organism that results from the symbiosis between fungi and algae. Grantina draws inspiration from lichen’s many adaptive qualities, like coexistence and self-replication, to devise her material processes.

The artist presents a new site-specific sculptural installation that interweaves cast silicone with paint, latex, fabric, and felt. Suspended from wooden planks and clinging to the gallery walls and floor, the work mimics how lichen grows by appearing to undergo construction and decomposition at once.