United Kingdom

Kotryna Ula Kiliulyte

www.kotrynaula.com

Biography

Kotryna Ula Kiliulyte (b.1986) is a Lithuanian photographer based in Glasgow, Scotland. After graduating with a First Class Honours in Visual Communication (specializing in photography) at the Glasgow School of Art, she worked on her personal projects and commissions and is about to start studying for MLitt in Fine Art Practice also at the Glasgow School of Art.
Her work ranges from documentary to constructed photography exploring the themes of identity, nostalgia and change.

The Fox is a project exploring the relationship between man and nature. These photographs were made in a fox hunting area in Lithuania.

Dubininkai is a village in rural Lithuania. Once a heaving settlement with people, animals and visitors, it now has only 5 people living there. It is a place so secluded that it only got it's first landline phone 15 years ago, and the only shop was at the back of a visiting lorry on Friday mornings.
A village once busy with farming, crops, cows, fishing and mushroom picking, started to change when young generation moved away.
Population 5 is a project about the place in transition. Dubininkai is a setting for memories of the past days and quiet anticipation about uncertain future.

Food and the way we eat has always been closely related to our cultural identity. Our roots and families define how we cook, shop and eat. In this day and age when migration is a common phenomenon, more and more people make their homes in new countries. For some it is an escape from economical hardship, for others- from uninspiring surroundings, and some come to taste a new culture for a few years. Newcomers might learn the language, adapt to a new culture, but certain aspects of identity remain the same. One of them is our relationship with food.
I am interested in the relationships in between food and homesickness, particular dishes and nostalgia, taste and memories. Cooking is a particular ritual performed not only to produce dinner or supper, but also to feed the emotional hunger, that could be created by being far from one's own culture.
The people I have interviewed for my project have all shared more than just lists of dishes, they all seemed to be transported to their childhood, sharing their most personal memories. The visual story I am telling is a story of escaping from one's usual and comfortable surroundings, making new home and life, and then escaping back through a plateful of nostalgia.