Justė Bernotaitė

Justė Bernotaitė is a Belfast-based painter whose work investigates the imprints history leaves on landscape, treating forests, rivers, and ruins as living repositories of memory and ancestral presence. Drawing on overlooked Lithuanian histories—particularly those of the Memel region and Kaunas—her paintings form layered environments where textured pigments and gestural marks evoke erosion, sediment, and transformation. Shapes drift in and out of clarity, creating surfaces where past and present intermingle, resisting linear narrative and fixed place.

In an era saturated with violent and desensitizing imagery, her work offers a quiet counterpoint. Through marks that shift between assertion and disappearance, she invites viewers to slow down, look with patience, and remain open to uncertainty. Meaning arises through the act of sustained attention, allowing memory, presence, and empathy to resurface.

Positioned at the threshold between visibility and absence, her practice engages broader questions of cultural survival and the politics of perception—revealing how histories, even when obscured, continue to press against the landscapes we inhabit.