Mycelia. Organic Compounds

Mycelia. Organic Compounds

The artist collective Mycelia brings together women artists from Germany and Latvia who have worked together for several years, organising exhibitions, workshops and other creative projects. Their collaboration is grounded in sisterhood and mutual support, creating space for each artist to develop her potential through shared practice – from collective creation and dialogue to process-based and performative work, as well as more intimate individual approaches. Since 2020, mycelium – the invisible network of fungal threads beneath the ground – has served as a metaphor for this collaboration between Latvian and German artists. It embodies solidarity rather than competition, diversity, transformation and the crossing of boundaries. Its membership may change, but the principles that hold the collective together remain. Mycelia is a creative ecosystem in which ideas, experiences and materials resonate with and enrich one another. 

“Mycelia. Organic Compounds” features ten artists: Karin Fröhlich, Patricia Lincke, Penelope Richardson, Sabine Schlunk and Silke Bachmann from Germany, and Laura Feldberga, Ingrīda Pičukāne, Sandra Strēle, Izolde Cēsniece and Anna Auziņa from Latvia.

Every object and installation in the exhibition is a new work. What brings them together is a desire to expand our understanding of the world by asking questions – first of the artists themselves, then of their viewers. The artists share certain materials and techniques, but also a particular attitude towards the world, one that values listening, curiosity and attentive engagement. In almost every work, the artist’s own physical presence plays an important part: her body has shaped its form and meaning, whether directly or indirectly. In social terms, the exhibition imagines an inclusive world on a human scale, where openness, tolerance and an inexhaustible joy in what we share are cherished values. It is itself a kind of community, whose members collaborate, influence one another and help each other’s talents flourish without surrendering their individual identities.

If one image could capture the exhibition as a whole, it would be that of a network: a web of connections, a system, a weave, a conversation and  space-time continuum.

Two large-scale works from Laura Feldberga’s “Winter Garden” are visible on the façades of Art Station Dubulti. Polyester netting forms their literal foundation, while colourful textile elements woven by the artist’s own hands transform the mesh into a vibrant, enveloping structure. The result appears to be decorativeness par excellence, yet it carries a social message that reaches beyond the collective’s founding principles. Since the beginning of the war in Ukraine, Feldberga has been making nets that evoke the camouflage netting used for protection. Even in peacetime, we weave symbolic safety nets to ease our fears and protect our dreams. And if someone were to turn the course of each of our lives through space and time into a work of art, it might well resemble a textured, colourful weave.

Sabine Schlunk’s installation “Whispers in the Grass” invites us to listen to the experiences of those who came before us – past generations, and women in particular. She encourages us to attune ourselves intuitively to the quiet traces of their lives, woven into the world and preserved in the memory of grass, trees, earth, water and clouds. She asks us to look with our inner eye and recognise the countless threads spun by earlier generations, bringing them into the present. Schlunk’s own body, soul and spirit are, to a considerable extent, the materials of her art. These are performative installations. She asks for the same from her viewers: physical, emotional and spiritual engagement. Through intuition and imagination, she gives these traces of the past a place in the present.

In “Incomplete : Like a Needle without an Eye”, Izolde Cēsniece asks how we might come to terms with our untapped resources, weakness and unrealised possibilities, turning them into allies rather than allowing a sense of incompleteness to control or threaten our lives. The installation’s very texture embraces human imperfection. On a tea-stained curtain and fragments of old wallpaper, the artist assembles passages she has copied out by hand from three very different sources: the Jewish legend of the golem, a Latvian folk tale about the dragon (a supernatural creature associated with acquiring wealth), and contemporary scholar Jana Kukaine’s monograph “Visceral Aesthetics: Affects and Feminist Art in Postsocialism” (2024). From these disparate texts, she weaves an eclectic network of insights into life and happiness.

Patricia Lincke builds her objects “Bounded #1”, “Bounded #2”, “Bounded #6” and “Bounded #7” from layers of translucent textile structures. Her work explores a web of conceptual relationships: between boundaries and their dissolution, the ordinary and the supernatural, inside and outside, concealment and revelation. Lincke’s objects are like diplomatic compromises, holding freedom and discipline, permission and prohibition, rules and sudden impulses in delicate balance. They are contemporary hybrids in terms of ideas and materials, in which contradictions turn into dialogue and the painterly capacity of textile art and the three-dimensional potential of sculpture merge.

Ingrīda Pičukāne works at the intersection of painting, drawing and animation in her comic “Allegria Floralis” and monumental mural “Fluffy Hug”. Her unusual pairing of flowers and women creates a world where the mythical lives of idealised fairies become indistinguishable from a feminist assertion of political body. Pičukāne has developed a distinctive genre that appears to belong to the bucolic, pastoral tradition, with its lyrical celebration of nature. Beneath this seemingly idyllic surface, however, lies a feminist manifesto celebrating women’s self-sufficient vitality. Her work is a testament to the diversity and creative inventiveness of feminist culture. The words used in the title and narrative of “Allegria Floralis” belong to an invented language of the artist’s own making.

Penelope Richardson addresses vast systems and connections on a cosmic scale, yet does so with a spirit akin to the radicalism of Fluxus and the exuberant extremity of punk culture. An enviable lightness of touch! In her video installation, bearing the sentimental title “As the Stars Move across the Sky and Unite Us, So Too Does The Ice Melt (Antarctic Project VIII)”, women dressed in white play the part of icebergs. They push their way through dense undergrowth, visibly bewildered by their unfamiliar surroundings. Here is climate change told in a wonderfully unorthodox way! The video, ink drawings and polystyrene objects are a sequel of the artist’s free-flowing imagination, that does not shy away from strong emotions and hyperbole.

Equally playful and entertaining are Sandra Strēle’s paintings of female garden gnomes – the Lady Rodas. Like Pičukāne’s feminist fairies, Strēle’s Lady Rodas assert their right to express a female identity in defiance of convention. They are revolutionaries : female garden gnomes only appeared in the 1960s. Though in 2004, the Garden Gnome Protection Association objected to the Lady Rodas made by the most popular German garden gnome factory (Zwergstatt Philipp Griebel Gräfenroda), arguing that historically the garden gnome has only been a man. It weaves a marginal fact from patriarchal discourse into the exhibition's network. The paintings combine an emphatically decorative style with the visual language of comics and are accompanied by the original sculptural figures of the Lady Rodas.

In her drawings, Silke Bachmann practises psychic automatism, the artistic technique championed by twentieth-century Surrealists. The exhibition includes several of her “Poem-Drawings” on handmade paper cast by the artist whose unpredictable textures add another element of chance and lend the works the quality of precious artefacts. Bachmann allows images to emerge from the unconscious over several drawing sessions. In her paintings, by contrast, she consciously develops the imagery produced by this process, heightening its symbolic meaning. “The Blank Circle”, created especially for “Mycelia. Organic Compounds”, explores harmony and the role of women in its creation.

Speaking about “Faces”, a video work in which she engages in conversation with her daughter, Anna Auziņa explains: “There are deep organic connections between mothers and daughters. Luce Irigaray's essay inspired me to create a work dedicated to the mother-daughter relationship, playfully illustrating efforts to strengthen their mutual connection. The process shown in the video reverses traditional mother and daughter roles, while the conversation questions various stereotypes and diversifies feminist perspectives.” Poetry is Auziņa’s principal form of artistic expression.

Sumi-e, the traditional Japanese art of ink painting, is founded on concentration, presence and a dialogue between brush, ink, water and paper. Karin Froehlich works with this technique, painting spiralling forms along an extended length of paper that is rolled up after painting. For Froehlich, human relationships are living, constantly changing structures. The recurring spiral forms in her work connect the impressions left by encounters, friendships, family ties, separations, memories and transformations. Her installation “Shared Threads” consists of two thirty-metre-long ink paintings that can be viewed both directly and in a mirror on the ground. It is a work to be experienced in silence, with the calm attention of contemplation.  

Text : Inga Šteimane

ABOUT ART STATION DUBULTI

Since 2015, Art Station Dubulti (Jūrmala, Latvia) has operated as an inclusive and experimental platform for contemporary art. A space that has redefined how contemporary art can inhabit and activate public infrastructure. Rather than being repurposed from one function into another, the Dubulti station has evolved into a hybrid environment where passengers and gallery visitors coexist. This overlap has shaped a layered and inclusive cultural experience, integrating contemporary art into daily life for a broader public. The Station’s dual identity guides the curatorial vision of its founder and director, Inga Šteimane. Supported by the Jūrmala City Council and the State Culture Capital Foundation, the programme maintains a high curatorial standard with a strong local and international pull.

Exhibition dates:  16 October 2026 – 31 January 2027

Opening hours: Daily, 9 am – 6 pm. Admission: Free. 

Art Station Dubulti https://artstationdubulti.lv

Supporters: Jūrmala City Council, the State Culture Capital Foundation, AKKA/LAA. 

The exhibition's public program consists of 10 workshops led by the exhibiting artists:

October 19, 14:00–15:30

Karin Froehlich. Workshop “Sumi-e | Japanese Ink Painting”. Application: dubulti.art.station@gmail.com

October 19, 16.00-17.30

Patricia Lincke. Drawing workshop “MYCELIA - a collective body”. The number of participants is not limited.

October 20, 14:00–15:30

Penelope Richardson. Workshop “Organic Cartography”. Drawing with tinted ice, pencil, and felt-tip pen. Application: dubulti.art.station@gmail.com

October 20, 16.00-17.30

Silke Bachmann. Automatic drawing (écriture automatique) workshop. The number of participants is not limited.

October 21, 12.00-13.30

Sabine Schlunk. Performative workshop “Whispers in the Grass”. The number of participants is not limited. 

October 22, 16.00-17.30

Izolde Cēsniece. A workshop where you can send words of support to yourself. Application: dubulti.art.station@gmail.com 

October 23, 14.00-15.30

Sandra Strēle. Lady Rodas painting workshop. Application: dubulti.art.station@gmail.com

October 23, 16.00-17.30

Ingrīda Pičukāne. Feminist Drawing Workshop. Application: dubulti.art.station@gmail.com

October 24, 14.00-15.30

Laura Feldberga’s performance workshop featuring elements of Butoh improvisation elements. Application: dubulti.art.station@gmail.com

October 25, 14.00-15.30

Anna Auziņa’s Poetry Writing Workshop. Application: dubulti.art.station@gmail.com