This forest is textured with different kinds of time, as the surface of the pool is dimpled with different kinds of rain. __ Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass

Undergrowth can be an imperceptible movement — slow, quiet, and persistent. Ieva Saudargaite Douaihi understands this, observing her natural characters — trees, bushes, bones, and other foraged materials — over extended periods until they inhabit her inner world. Drawn from her environment, they represent a view of nature as a hidden, mystical force to be witnessed.

In The trees before last, trees are anthropomorphic subjects overtaking the city landscape. They redirect the gaze, asserting their presence beyond urban narratives of desolation. Leaves embellish — flutter across — the headlights of a red car (Green eyelashes). Trunks burst through building confines, embodying the energy of their names: Curtain Fig, Jerusalem Thorn, Umbrella Plant, Fiddle Leaf Fig. Notably Eucalyptus Tree hiding the Beirut Port Silos (Eucalyptus Globulus) obscures the evidence of Beirut’s 2020 port blast, a site of national trauma. Thriving in-situ, it twists upwards towards an alternate future.

In Woodwounds, bark becomes the artist’s canvas. Ieva etches drawings of tangled beings: plugs, hoses, barbed wire, bicycle reflectors and surveillance cameras on trees. A broken reflector becomes a guardian beacon on a pine at night. Here, natural life is inscribed with the detritus of human systems, which are appropriated in turn. Ieva’s work is built on juxtapositions — past and present, natural and artificial, found and made — with one image or object rising on the surface of the other. Vintage photographs of unknown histories form grounds for new inscriptions and layers of visibility in Dictionary of past and current self series. Soaps, cosmetics, and her child’s art supplies enter these compositions as both relics and residues. In this series, these can be read as low-relief “image-objects” that straddle the familiar and the familial. Hybrid forms function like expanded memories: speculative and fragile.

In Nuclear Family, three figures shrouded in mylar shimmer with erasure, while in Split Milk, a cactus skeleton warps over two parents changing their baby’s diaper roadside. A lime-yellow drop of Pears soap is carved to become Tears — its form intimate and emotionally loaded. Even in acts of effacement, each gesture feels personal, closer to home.

Grandma’s Hands cleverly overlays the portrait of a woman with that of an elder holding a baby, both figures submerged in a sea of thread like static. One mother replaces another. The sense of loss is real but the materials glimmer, hopeful. A forked branch wrapped in pink metal leaf recalls Douaihi’s childhood in Lithuania, where candy wrappers were left out for magpies — birds known to collect and bury shiny things in nests. Memory, here, is elusive yet cumulative. The artist isolates her objects-as subjects so they can be held, studied, mourned — each one surfacing like undergrowth.

Foraging is a key part of this practice. Douaihi’s long walks become a hunting ritual. Michel de Certeau writes in the Practice of Everyday Life that walking is a « space of enunciation ». As a way of speaking within the city’s grid, Ieva’s objects retrieve words, each assemblage a phrase. Dictionary of past and current self becomes a subtle yet purposeful attempt to define language, an attempt to cling to meaning in a world that frays at its edges.

If undergrowth signals what is hidden, emergent, or insufficiently visible, then Pan’s Garden is its inverse: chaotic overgrowth. In this video, an abandoned car is consumed by a blackberry bush. Douaihi monitored this slow act of engulfment over four years of nature reclaiming industrial matter. Her film documents the bush’s clearing by gardeners in reverse, rendering the removal uncanny. Played backwards, the bush doesn’t die — it rises. Rushing in to meet, and resist, it is a living agent that manipulates time, blurring the line between ruin and renewal.

In all of Ieva’s work, there’s a measured precision at odds with the unruly subjects she tends to — nature overrunning buildings, grief stitched into surface, time playing itself backwards. Inspired by Gordon Matta-Clark’s incisions, her framing reveals the illusion of containment and structure. What appears bounded is always breaching. What seems lost is still forming a shape — a life through the ever-so-slow labor of time.

Nadine Khalil, June 2025

Ieva Saudargaite Douaihi (b.1988) is a transdisciplinary artist working at the intersection of photography, architecture, and material research. Rooted in an ongoing exploration of vernacular landscapes, memory, and overlooked ecologies, her practice spans image making, spatial interventions, and hybrid objects composed of found objects, natural matter and household materials. Drawing on her background in architecture and a deep sensitivity to ecological and social entanglements, she engages with overlooked spaces and slow processes of growth, decay, and adaptation. Through layered relationships between nature, memory, and the built environment, Douaihi explores how spaces carry histories, absences, and the potential for renewal. Her work gives form to questions of permanence, access, and belonging—unfolding as quiet gestures that trace the ways in which people and places shape, resist, or intertwine with one another. Douaihi studied architecture at the Lebanese American University in Byblos and École Spéciale d’Architecture in Paris; she grew up between Lithuania, the United Arab Emirates and Lebanon. In 2021, she co-founded Digital Fountain, an online platform for photography from Lebanon. In 2022, she established Takeover, an artist-led project space in Beirut. She is also a member of the Lebanese photography collective Collectif 1200.

UNDERGROWTH A solo exhibition by Ieva Saudargaite Douaihi

From June 26th until July 26th, 2025

Opening: Thursday June 26, 2025, from 6 to 9 PM

Exhibition dates: On view until July 26, 2025

Opening hours: Tuesday to Friday, 12 PM to 6 PM

Saturday, 12 PM to 4 PM