Artist Statement

When I touched clay for the first time, I knew that sculpture was the best way for me to tell my story. When I sculpt, I experience feelings and images that dwell in my subconscious mind. These are revealed to me as I form the clay and fashion the ideas into actual objects. Sculpting is my relationship with life on all levels and its very sacred to me. It allows me to look inside myself and then out to the world around me. I get great pleasure from following and trusting my intuition and process. I need to do it. I don’t have a choice. My formative years in Russia provided the context for much of my artistic expression. Drawing upon early cultural and educational experiences, vision and feelings connect and emerge from the clay.

Biography

I was born in Kiev Ukraine, where I spent the first thirty years of my life. Thus, Russian culture, in the forms of music, poetry, visual art, and meditation, were an important part of my life there. I was trained as a speech pathologist and worked in that field for eight years. I moved to the United States in 1978 to escape religious persecution in the Soviet Union. I arrived without family or friends, knowledge of English, or monetary support. I was a single mother with a 4-year old son. It took me twenty years to build a new life and to bring my family to this country. As a consequence, I am largely a self-taught artist. I was not able to articulate my artistic feelings for a very long time. But, when I felt clay for the first time, I knew I found my medium. I was 55 years old.