About
I am an artist, sculptor, and mom exploring the powerful poetry of our biology through sculpture, photography, and installation. Using ancient techniques of bronze and glass sculpture—carefully observed through the photographic lens—I probe the connections between the biological body and the cognitive mind in the aggressively digital world we inhabit today.
My Story
My work grows out of my life in motherhood, with its extreme physicality and profound psychological demands, as a starting point for restating the existential interpretation of the human chase of survival and pleasure. My physical disabilities related to a congenital neural tube defect, and my ongoing struggle with PTSD further compound my experience.
This rich personal context guides my collaborations with extreme temperatures and historical craft traditions and imparts time-tested handcrafted physicality to my art. My works exist as time-traveling relics of human evolution. They joyfully cannibalize my many lives as an artist, a lawyer, a farmer, and a mother - at home in Moscow, Tashkent, Sonoma County, and Central Virginia.
I work intuitively and directly, often impelled by the physical interaction of my hands with the materials. In repeated rounds of manipulation with sewing needles, torches, washing machines, and furnaces, I search for and magnify the basal behaviors of my chosen materials. This playful dialogue between hands and materials presents me with a rare opportunity for using my basic faculties, now under increasing pressure of extinction from today’s instantaneous electronic world.
In collaboration with extreme temperatures, my biological abstractions dance, juggle, and stretch into seductive bodily cavities. They may appear as anomalous dancers, prime for transfiguration into embryos, vulvas, or something like felted Russian snow boots, the “valenki.” Stripped of their socially acceptable façades, they display the psychological truths of an animal body. They expose my internal experience as a living, breathing, and, at times, ovulating container of my children’s memories.
Engaging with the proliferation of digital visual cues, I rely on the photographic lens to create psychological portraits and immersive installations, such as Sēnsōrium Series. Viewers enter the distorted space and become active participants in my work by interfering with projections and casting their own dynamic shadows. The moment the viewers pause, the installation transforms into an introspective space in the middle of competing beams of light filled with flickering images.
Thermal Cavity is an ambiguous space between microbiology and the outer space. The light beams filled with monstrous biological entities crisscross the gallery space as if captured by the Webb telescope. Combined with bronze sculptures placed at eye level, they call for ruminating on the simultaneous possibilities in the face of our rush to embrace connectivity or convenience.
Another immersive installation, Today was Tomorrow Yesterday, activates my work in conversation with interior architecture. Composed of surround projection of architectural spaces intermingling images cast glass sculptures floating in space and their bronze iterations. In the projections expand the perceived architecture of the physical space. Bronze sculptures, centered within arm’s reach, respond to touch with subtle movement.
At other times, viewers may encounter an almost ninety foot illuminated scroll of photographs suspended in the shape of two overlapping infinities, like in Long Letter Home. They engage with one fragment of the scroll at a time and meander around tracing the outline of the larger shape, experiencing a different kind of scrolling.
Born in Moscow, Russia in 1977 and raised in Tashkent, Uzbekistan, I immigrated to the United States in 1995. I hold a BFA in Sculpture and Extended Media from Virginia Commonwealth University (2024). Prior to relocating to Richmond, VA in 2021 with my husband and three children, I have lived and worked in Washington, DC and the San Francisco Bay Area.
In 2022, I was awarded the Vikki Katel Memorial Scholarship in Sculpture. In 2024, I received Best in Show/Sculpture award in VCUArts Juried Undergraduate Exhibition from juror Misa Jeffries, Associate Curator at the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis. I have been invited to participate in the Artist-in-Residence program at the KALA Art Institute in Berkeley, CA in 2025.