My practice begins with touch. Before any concept, before any idea, there is the material in my hands — fabric, thread, net, found object — and the physical encounter with it. Something happens in that moment of contact that I cannot fully explain and have stopped trying to. The material knows things. It holds them in its texture, its weight, its smell, the way it resists or yields to the needle.

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I am drawn to textile because it is the most human of materials. We are born into it and buried in it. We sleep under it, press it against our faces, wear it until it takes the shape of our bodies. It absorbs us — our warmth, our gestures, the repetition of our days. A piece of fabric that has been lived with for years carries that life in ways that are not visible but are felt immediately when you hold it. This is not metaphor. This is the material itself, speaking.

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I work across embroidery, textile sculpture, and collage, investigating how material carries memory, identity, and time. My practice is rooted in the lived experience of migration — I was born in Moscow and have spent recent years moving between places, existing between cultures, between languages, between versions of myself. From this condition I find it impossible to view identity as fixed. It is instead something perpetually in motion, perpetually reconstructing itself in relation to objects, situations, and people. The found materials I work with carry this same instability. They have been somewhere. They have been touched. They record, in their fibres, a relationship between a human body and the specific world that body moved through.

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We live in an age of anxiety — not only personal but civilisational. The certainties that once organised experience have become unstable: identity is plural, time is non-linear, reality itself branches. Quantum mechanics tells us that at the moment of any decision, the universe does not choose — it splits. The version of ourselves that took the other path is still out there, equally real, equally lost to us. I find this not terrifying but strangely intimate. It means that what we carry — memory, gesture, the trace of touch in a piece of worn fabric — is the only evidence we have that we were here, in this branch, in this body, at this moment. The stitch is a form of testimony.

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It is in these spaces — between the personal and the collective, the intimate and the historical, the handmade and the found — that I locate my practice. At the edges where one thing ends and another begins. Where the body meets the landscape. Where memory accumulates in matter rather than in words. My work does not offer resolution. It offers presence — the particular, irreplaceable presence of a thing that has been touched, and touched again, and is still here.