About

My work begins with observation of people, landscapes, events, and moments that stay with me long after they pass. But I rarely depict what I see directly. Instead, I wait for the transformation: the moment when a person, once known more deeply, stops being a face and becomes something abstract — layered, textured, reshaped by everything I now understand about them.

Fiber art is my language for this process. I work primarily with natural materials — raffia, wool, seagrass, and ceramic — chosen not for their beauty alone, but for their behaviour. Raffia is rough and honest, carrying something of the wild and the elemental. Sometimes it reminds me of Ukrainian wheat fields, sometimes of the Portuguese landscape where I now live and gather it from local makers. Wool is yielding and warm. Ceramic holds fingerprints, imperfections, the undeniable trace of human hands.

I think of myself less as a designer and more as someone running experiments, drawn to the unpredictable, to what happens when traditional techniques meet unfamiliar forms. The process is slow by nature and by choice. I am a person of process. The making itself, tactile, unhurried, full of small discoveries, is where meaning forms.

Since leaving Ukraine in 2022, my practice has become a way of holding two worlds simultaneously: memory and presence, loss and new roots. The materials carry this tension quietly. Nothing is cast from a mold. Everything is built by hand, layer by layer, the way understanding is built, the way we come to know anything at all.