artist Statement

My artistic practice is an inquiry into beauty, memory, and belonging—shaped by personal loss, spiritual seeking, and migration across cultural landscapes. I was born and raised in Moscow under the shadow of Soviet ideology, and later spent two decades in New York City. Architecture became an emotional and visual vocabulary through which I understood change, time, and identity. From Soviet Brutalism to modernist and contemporary design, built environments revealed their own hierarchies of values, each leaving imprints on my imagination.

Grief is a quiet undercurrent in my work. The death of my mother during my formative years marked a turning point in how I see the world. Her deep reverence for wildflowers—those scrappy, uncultivated blooms—instilled in me a love for the overlooked and ephemeral. She once told me, “If you can love the wildflowers, you can love everyone.” That ethos runs through every part of my practice. I find beauty in the unassuming: what others discard, ignore, or deem worthless. Nature became both a sanctuary and a guide—an entry point into spirituality and a reminder of our shared impermanence.

My work spans painting, sculpture, and installation, often using materials that speak to fragility and transformation. Cast cement, glass, and light interact with hand-painted surfaces, domestic objects, and natural forms. I’m drawn to the tensions between permanence and decay, function and transcendence, the man-made and the organic. These juxtapositions offer portals into a more reflective, attentive state of being.

I see art as a form of meditation—a behavioral practice in stillness, gratitude, and presence. My intention is to create experiences that invite viewers to slow down, look closely, and connect more deeply with their inner lives and the natural world. Influences range from the esoteric geometry of Hilma af Klint to the immersive materiality of Sarah Sze, and from ancient myth to the speculative poetics of bio-art. Suzanne Anker’s teachings in visual biology and eco-art continue to shape my understanding of ecology as both metaphor and matter.

Ultimately, my practice explores how we metabolize life: how we carry loss, search for meaning, and rediscover wonder in the quiet, in-between spaces of the everyday. In the ruins of what is discarded, I seek the sacred. In nature’s wild grammar, I find my truest language.