'I love you Gertrūda': Meet the artist making self-love an endurance art on TikTok

Three years ago, Gertrūda Gilytė picked up some neon green yarn and knitted herself a scarf emblazoned with the affirmation: ‘I love you Gertrūda’. 

It was the beginning of what would become the Lithuanian conceptual artist’s longest and largest durational art project. Having now made 65 of the scarves, she plans to keep going until reaching her goal of selling them to the art market: “I'm just very happy to do it until I die, to be honest.”  

A Berlin-based market researcher by day, Gertrūda knits the scarves in her spare time, uploading daily videos of the project to TikTok as performance art that commentates on the commodification of self-care.

The idea evolved from a two-year video project she had previously conducted on Instagram, about positive thinking and the law of attraction. It featured over 700 hours of filmed repetitions such as, “I’m a successful artist, I will have my work in an exhibition”, but the format began to feel limited. In searching for a more tangible way to express herself, she found knitting. 

“I read this book about neuroplasticity, and it was talking about knitting being a great way to rewire your brain, to change the negative thought patterns to positive ones,” Gertrūda tells Euronews Culture. “In that same book, they were saying that to practice self-compassion, something I also really struggle with, it's recommended to wake up every morning and say I love you and your own name.”

Every scarf is slightly different, the soft slopey stitches startled by colourful and clumsy lettering that carries a sweet, solitary kind of earnestness, like seeing the name of a stranger scrawled on the blank white space of a toilet cubicle. 

In a world that's so often consumed by hatred and self-loathing, there's a gentle power to their declarations, the strange simplicity and shock of stitching love for yourself into existence.

"I'm trying to use tools that could be fitted under wellness, personal development or self-care - it's a very big umbrella term, and while I'm doing it, create artwork out of this practice," she explains.

Ideas around self-love, self-improvement and positive thinking have become pervasive on social media - as the Cambridge Dictionary Word of the Year proves. While celebrities like Dua Lipa have attributed their success to manifestation, TikTok influencers constantly remind us to nurture our inner-child.

Such messages are at once soothing and grating, the subject of wellness muddied by pseudoscience and those pushing snake oil. The superficial nature of social media can also render promotional self-care somewhat soulless, promising easy fixes that fizzle with a swipe.

While many have viewed Gertrūda’s project as a positive and, most importantly, authentic expression of self-care, her intention was to show how personal development has become performative, and our own vulnerabilities an unquelled well of obsession and validation seeking.

“It's about the lengths people will go, me included, to analyse myself, to get stuck on this self-care thing without doing anything externally,” she says. “The obsessive repeating to myself, until the very end - it's very sad and also very positive at the same time. Because this sentence, 'I love you Gertrūda', I'm expecting to hear from others, I guess. It has this very poetically tragic element to it too.”

In contemplating the hyper-individualistic nature of social media, one of Gertrūda’s ideas was to model her knits on football fandom scarves and complete a photoshoot in a stadium filled with people wearing them, herself standing amongst them all. 

“It's about this self-obsession, about fandom, about being a bit narcissistic and egotistic as an artist, wanting this clout and validation all the time," she shares with Euronews Culture. "It’s also about the lengths that we will go to alone instead of doing something for others. Like, I'm doing [this project] all for myself. Of course, it would be better for me if I did it for other people. Absolutely. But there's this loop of, you can call it self-care, but you can also call it self-harm, because it's so alone.” 

At nearly 2,000 followers on TikTok, responses to the project have been overwhelmingly supportive, with many people asking to buy one of the scarves - but Gertrūda remains staunch in refusing.  

“I will knit the same one over and over again until I sell them in the art market as art objects, so it's basically a continuation of my previous projects where I stop doing this activity when the art market perceives it as valuable,” she explains.  

“I also understand that the goal I set is not very realistic. But I think there is a strength in this concept, because the longer I don't sell - maybe I will never sell, destined now to knit these scarves forever - and in ten years I will have such an impressive amount that it's even too crazy for me to think about. So there's no way I'm losing here. And I also get to practice these health benefits of knitting things.” 

Pastime paradise

Once seen as a hobby for grandmas, knitting, alongside other textile crafts like crochet and embroidery, have seen a huge uptick in younger people taking part since the COVID pandemic. From the over 745k uses of #Knitting on TikTok, to the purled penises of a ‘naughty needles’ subreddit, this traditionally “old fashioned” past time has been reclaimed as something young and fun that can be both comforting and anarchistic.  

In one of her TikTok videos, Gertrūda proclaims “knitting is the new smoking”, an attempt to reframe its traditionally wholesome perception into a cool habit that’s also a healthier coping mechanism.    

“I think knitting is such a good metaphor for everything we as society crave right now. It's not being on your phone, it's commitment, it's mindfulness, repetition. It's creating objects, creating the things you can wear. It can be more sustainable than other things. It just encapsulates so many values we seek,” she says, adding, “I'm also playing with this image of the wholesome, committed knitter. It's very hard to imagine a villain that knits.”  

Inspired by the performance art of Tehching Hsieh and Wolfgang Stoerchle, the latter of whom is best-known for his 1972 work 'Attempt Public Erection', in which he stood for hours trying to get an erection in front of an audience, Gertrūda has always been fascinated with concepts centred around endurance. Oftentimes, these concepts lead nowhere, but the attempt - and fulfilment to be found within - is the point.

“I'm really trying to create the concept that I cannot fail. So, the longer I don't sell my scarves, you know, the better it is for me, the more impressive my artwork becomes. The same was with my previous work. The longer I didn't get this institutional acceptance, the longer I had to practice this positive thinking every day, which was very good for me. It's very inspiring, the concept of work having no way of failing.”