After emigration, the idea of a garden stopped being connected to a fixed place. It became something fragile and portable — a living memory carried across borders.
The Wild Chickens are hybrid beings suspended between flower, bird, and shelter. Their legs reference the Slavic folkloric image of the house on chicken legs — a home capable of moving, escaping, surviving.
Each sculpture exists in a state between rootedness and migration. They appear playful and ornamental at first glance, yet beneath their delicate surfaces lies a quiet tension: the impossibility of fully settling, and the instinct to keep moving.
Constructed from hand-dyed paper and hand-painted clay, each piece is built through labour-intensive layering, cutting, sculpting, and painting — fragile botanical forms balanced on animal-like bodies. Wandering ecosystems carrying their own gardens with them.
The series reflects on memory, mobility, and the shifting meaning of home.
Wild Chickens
Tatiana
Royally uncomfortable
Some ideas arrive fully formed. Living in the desert, invited to exhibit around the theme of chairs, the image came immediately: a throne upholstered in cactus.
There is something honest about a seat that cannot be sat in. Furniture promises comfort, belonging, a place that is yours. The cactus refuses all of that — beautiful, architectural, and completely inhospitable.
The series exists as both drawings and objects, exploring the gap between the decorative and the unbearable. A chair that looks like home but feels like nowhere.
Candles
After years of working with tension and contradiction — weapons softened by flowers, familiar forms made strange — I wanted to try the opposite: to take something completely ordinary and make it quietly extraordinary.
Candle making, for me, became a form of grounding — a slow practice after the intensity of sculptural work. Wax cannot be rushed. It teaches you to work with time instead of against it.
Each piece begins with the search for the right vegetable — a curve, a tension, a surface that feels almost sculptural. I create a silicone mold preserving every detail and imperfection, then finish each candle by hand. No two are the same.
I work with 100% Spanish beeswax — a natural material with its own warmth and subtle scent.
Each candle is a small, attentive study of form, texture, and atmosphere — made slowly, by hand, and meant to be felt as much as seen.
