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The ancient image of the ouroboros – that of a snake devouring itself – is a potent symbol of life’s never-ending cycle of destruction and rebirth. Be it day turning tonight, or the ceaseless rhythms of nature, manifold civilisations have found balance in this violence, safe in the knowledge that whatever devastation was endured, there would always be a new dawn.
But what happens when the scales tip? When both humanity and the planet are subjected to such punishing processes of extraction and contamination that the possibility of an eternal death seems not only plausible, but unavoidable?
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These are the questions that concern Emilija Škarnulytė, a Lithuanian multimedia artist who was born shortly after the devastating Chernobyl disaster, which left her own grandmother blind due to radioactive fallout. ‘[Radioactivity is] something that we cannot see and we cannot touch, but it has this immense power that humans created and cannot control any more,’ she says, in reference to Burial, a 2022 artwork-cum-documentary set in her nation’s Ignalina nuclear power plant (known as Chernobyl’s ‘twin’). In this hour-long film, a python slithers through the abandoned control room, bearing witness to human folly, before the camera travels elsewhere to find more relics, including a once-hidden Polish uranium mine and Etruscan ruins.
Škarnulytė assumes the viewpoint of a ‘future archaeologist’ when embarking on her projects, visualising the geological traces one might find thousands of years from now through a blend of scientific prediction and primordial myth; the result is at once raw in its realism and utterly fantastical. Several of her pieces, inspired by the work of archaeologist and anthropologist Marija Gimbutas, explore feminine water deities; in a number of them, the artist transforms into an alluring chimera through snakeskins, glistening fish tails and crystalline face adornments reminiscent of ancient rock formations. In Riparia (2023), two mermaid-like hybrid creatures engage in a ritualistic aquatic embrace, just downstream from a Swiss hydroelectric plant. They are seemingly unaware of the human-made machinations churning the waters nearby.
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A similar finned goddess appears in Æqualia (2023) coursing through Brazil’s Encontro das Aguas, where the black waters of the Rio Negro converge with the silty whitewater of the Solimões River. The beauty of this strange phenomenon, filmed from above, is augmented not only by the ethereal figure of the artist, but a pod of pink dolphins that swim beside her like sacred guardians. A year after the film was made, catastrophic drought caused a mass die-off of this endangered species.
Technological advances and ancient legends also collide in Škarnulytė’s most recent residency, at Porthmeor Studios in St Ives. Best known as a haven for the British Modernists, this harbour town is steeped in both the folklore of Celtic Kernow culture and the coastal vestiges of the copper- and tin-mining industries, now abandoned.
For this new line of inquiry, the artist spent a month visiting standing stones and Neolithic quoits, as well as the Goonhilly Earth Station, a commercial deep space communications system that was once the largest in the world. Her latest film, Telstar, reflects on these disparate manmade gateways to the celestial, while other offerings return anew to the ocean’s unknown depths.
‘Emilija Škarnulytė’ runs until 12 April 2026 at Tate St Ives, Cornwall. For more information visit tate.org
A version of this article appeared in the January 2026 issue of ‘The World of Interiors’. Learn about our subscription offers
