I did not set out to become an artist.
I trained as a software engineer and spent years working with websites and design. It was a very different kind of work – structured, technical and largely digital – and for a long time I had no reason to imagine another profession.
In 2014, after russia occupied my native Crimea, I left with my young son and began again in another part of Ukraine. Over the next few years, life took us through several cities before we settled in Kherson. That was where ceramics entered my life.
What began almost by accident became serious very quickly: I taught myself to work with clay, developed my own pieces and eventually opened a ceramics studio. I made functional and decorative work, taught workshops and worked with children and families. A completely different life had taken shape around something I had never planned to do.
By 2022, ceramics was no longer something I had simply discovered. It was my work, my studio and a world I had built over several years.
Then russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, and Kherson was occupied.
In May, I left the city with my son and our cat and came to Bulgaria. The studio stayed behind. So did the equipment, the materials and the possibility of continuing the work in the form I knew.
A ceramics studio is not something you can put into a suitcase.
For the second time, I had to work out what could be built from where I was.
The answer, this time, was textile.
In Bulgaria, I began working with punch needle embroidery and soon took on a project far larger than anything I had first imagined: The Stone Embroideries of Nova Kakhovka in Textiles.
I recreated architectural ornaments designed in the 1950s for Nova Kakhovka as twelve hand-embroidered textile panels, with a total area of more than twelve square metres.
The work was first exhibited in Sofia in 2023 and later shown in the Czech Republic, France and Belgium.
The exhibitions did not end my experiments with punch needle.
I kept experimenting with scale, colour, ornament and form – making large decorative pieces, smaller textile works and, eventually, bags.
Those early bags were the beginning of a different question: what happens when textile leaves the wall and becomes an object?
That question stayed with me, and eventually led to a new way of thinking about bags – their structure, construction and presence.
The image was no longer the end point. Form itself had become part of the work
Then I started again.
NoBoringBagsArt grew from everything that came before it, but it is not simply a continuation of my textile work. Bags demanded a different kind of thinking: structure, construction, new materials, new techniques and the constant negotiation between an object that must function and an object that deserves to be looked at.
This time, the new beginning was my choice.
Today I create one-of-a-kind pieces and small series that sit somewhere between accessory, craft and art object. I am interested in bold form, meticulous handwork, unexpected scale, colour and objects with enough character not to disappear politely into an outfit.
I have had enough of things that disappear politely.
Artist & Founder · NoBoringBagsArt