The daughter of Sun

•

Last year I was offered to make a winter solstice themed exhibition of my illustrations in a local culture and event center. Together with the project manager of this place, keeping in mind the possible Covid19 restriction, we decided to use the outer space of the building so that the exhibition could be available for everyone in any case.

As a result, I created four illustrations that were later printed on a self-adhesive material and attached to the windows.

The title of the exhibition is "Saule deva savu meitu no veļiem šai zemē" ("the Sun brought her daughter from the underworld to our world"). It's taken from the Latvian folk song, and it's a story of the light coming back after the winter solstice.

These are mummers dressed as cranes. Mummering is an important custom when it comes to celebrating winter solstice in a traditional way in Latvia.

These two are a wolf and a goat, darkness and light. There's a traditional Latvian game with the same name, where a wolf have to catch a goat. This game represents what is happening on winter solstice night, the shortest night of the year: darkness wins, but the light is reborn in the morning. A costumes of wolf and goat are among the most popular mummers' costumes here in Latvia

Juniper smoke was believed to have an ability to banish the evil. I'm not sure it the ritual of purifying the atmosphere by walking through the rooms with the burning juniper branch in a hand was really a thing back in the past, but I like the idea itself :)

In real life:

Apart from these, there was an idea to create plywood figures of mummers and put them around the building. Due to lack of time and, probably, some miscommunication, they didn't turn out as good as expected, but I used them later to create postcards, so, luckily, it wasn't waste of time :)