Living Between Ireland and Lithuania

Returning to Lithuania did not provide Greta with a simple resolution. If anything, it gave greater definition to the space between her two cultures.

“I don’t feel Lithuanian, and I also don’t feel Irish at all,” she says. “I’m in this in-between, in the diaspora of the two.”

It is an uncomfortable position, but also an artistically fertile one. Greta can recognise connections that might be less visible from entirely within either culture. Lithuania and Ireland have different histories, languages and traditions, yet both carry strong relationships with land, folklore, pagan custom, migration and cultural identity.

Greta sees the logical continuation of the Folk Project as an exploration of its Irish counterpart. Placing the cultures beside one another would allow her to examine similarities without pretending they are interchangeable. More importantly, it could create an honest visual language for the hybrid identity already shaping her life.

Such work would also speak to an Ireland that has never been as static as its narrowest definitions suggest. Migration is not an interruption to modern Irish identity; it is one of the forces continually remaking it. Greta’s perspective offers an opportunity to understand belonging as something constructed through participation and relationship, rather than granted only by birthplace or perfect cultural fluency.

Language embodies this complexity. Greta speaks Lithuanian fluently, but because she left at a young age, her formal reading education in the language was interrupted. During her return, she searched galleries and cultural spaces in Vilnius and found a collection of Lithuanian and wider Baltic poetry translated into English.

“Whenever I don’t feel inspired, I read the poems over and over again as a way to connect,” she says. “The things they speak about can be very specific to the culture.”

The translated poems allow Greta to reach a part of her inheritance through the language in which she can now read most freely. Translation becomes neither a failure nor a lesser form of connection. It becomes the bridge available to her. Poetry joins photography, philosophy and visual art within the wide field of material she continually consumes, carrying elements of Baltic culture back into her daily life in Ireland.

When Words Are Not Enough

Before Greta imagined a career in photography, she wanted to become a therapist. She was fascinated by human behaviour, mental health and the relationship between thought, emotion and the ways people treat one another. That interest has never disappeared, but a profound loss changed the route through which she began pursuing it.

After the death of a close friend, Greta found that language could not contain the scale or complexity of grief.

“When we go through very big emotions, traumatic things or the loss of somebody close, words don’t always make you feel better,” she says. “Grief isn’t something you can simply talk through. You have to experience it.”

Making art became central to how Greta moved through that experience. Rather than leaving her earlier interests behind, she redirected them into visual work. She continues to read psychology and philosophy independently, and that knowledge informs the attention she gives to the inner world of the person being photographed.

This is one of the qualities that distinguishes Greta’s portraiture. She can create theatrical, high-contrast images filled with stylised light, bold colour and carefully constructed personas, but she does not reduce the subject to an accessory within her own aesthetic. The question is not simply how Greta wants them to look. It is what they are trying to communicate and what kind of environment will allow them to do so without retreating behind self-consciousness.

Her images can be vivid, strange, romantic, gothic or playful because the people within them have been invited to participate in the act of their own representation. Greta’s style remains recognisable, but it is spacious enough to hold another person’s identity.

That capacity is especially visible in her collaborations with musicians. For Alana Henderson’s 2026 single Appetite, Greta directed and edited a black-and-white music video drawing upon silent cinema, surrealism and a darkly playful visual order. The song examines perfectionism, denial and the experience of building a life around what one believes one ought to want. Greta responded with roses, cake, ritualised movement and a self-contained world that never overpowered the emotional source of the song.

Describing their collaboration, Henderson emphasised that Greta “listened, really listened” and translated the original idea into images that felt true to what had existed in her head. It is a brief statement, but it captures something essential about Greta’s impact. She does not arrive to impose a ready-made answer. She listens closely enough to discover the visual answer that belongs to the person beside her.