I work with fabric, thread, and found or gifted materials. I intentionally avoid using new textiles — all the fabrics in my work are secondhand: once worn, forgotten, passed down. For me, this is a way to engage with the past and assemble new visual narratives from its fragments.
My technique is rooted in improvisation. I don’t plan compositions in detail or follow fixed sketches. Each piece emerges through process: I begin with a loose hand-drawn outline, then let the fabric and gesture guide the work. It’s a chaotic, physical, and emotional method — and that openness becomes part of the meaning.
The themes I return to are personal responses to what’s happening in the world and in my own life. I translate them into images through a cast of invented characters and recurring motifs that have been with me since childhood. Together, they form a personal mythology — a system of signs, states, and forms where feeling becomes the primary content.
I became interested in photography at the age of 14, and by 18 I was working with major fashion brands in Moscow as a photographer and designer. After the war began, I left Russia and continued my visual practice in Tbilisi and Bangkok — creating photo shoots, identity design, and graphics for bars, clubs, and public spaces
POPULISM
88X88
thread, fabric, needle, wire
“POPULISM” does not argue.
It exists whole, glass-clear, anxiously transparent.
Words are bound into a single surface, without breaks or contradictions — on the plaque held by a body wounded by its own needle.
5.9.25
INNARDS
70X267
thread, fabric, needle
14.6.25
Innards is one of the most personal and large-scale works in my artistic practice so far. It emerged from a sharp, piercing experience that shot through my mind and uncovered something long-stitched deep inside. At the height of this inner tension — almost in a trance — I sketched it out. The piece came into being within just a few hours and has remained untouched ever since.
The title reflects the essence of the work quite literally. My “Innards” is an attempt to materialize something that defies structure: anxiety, sorrow, pain, confusion, the fear of loss. By giving these emotions a physical form, I may have been able to release them.
The composition unfolds through two interwoven narratives. The first is internal, autobiographical — a primal emotion, the original impulse that sparked the piece. It runs like a red thread through the work, trying to piece itself together within it, like Lego bricks assembling in the dark.
The second is a mythic, fictional narrative embedded within the structure of the work. It tells the story of a protagonist in an imagined world who performs a self-punishing ritual of sacrifice in order to summon a destructive force — something powerful enough to collapse the old world and make space for the birth of a new one.
