I construct encounters through objects and installations using embroidery, tambour beading, sewing, quilting, and other textile-based techniques. Drawing from my experiences as a queer woman adopted from Russia and raised in the United States, I investigate how inherited narratives, fragmented histories, and material relationships shape identity and belonging.

Rather than pursuing a singular visual language, each work responds to a specific conceptual question. Material, form, and installation shift according to the encounter each piece is intended to create. Labor-intensive processes become methods of constructing meaning through repetition, embellishment, repair, and accumulation, transforming ideas into material experience.

Through these encounters, viewers become active participants in meaning-making, bringing their own memories, assumptions, and lived experiences into dialogue with the work. Rather than presenting fixed narratives, I am interested in how different forms of encounter generate new ways of considering identity, belonging, and inherited histories.