My journey with jewellery began in 2008, after a workshop in Kyiv sparked my curiosity about working on a small, intimate scale. What started as experimentation soon grew into a deeper fascination with adornment as both object and cultural expression.
My interest truly ignited while curating a fashion show of traditional Ukrainian clothing. Immersing myself in the richness of these garments led me to closely study traditional Ukrainian multi-row jewellery — its structure, symbolism, rhythm, and presence. These pieces are more than decoration; they carry history, identity, and a strong visual language.
Since then, I have created hundreds of jewellery pieces, each one informed by that tradition while shaped through my own contemporary sensibility. Working at this scale allows for precision, repetition, and variation — a dialogue between heritage and personal expression.
Jewellery, for me, is another way of telling stories through form and material — wearable, tactile, and closely connected to the body.
My Master of Design (Hon.) at COFA, UNSW focused on one question: How can we improve children’s engagement with printed materials to support better learning outcomes? My research shows that the more areas of the brain engaged in processing information, the stronger the memorisation and recall. I explored how to activate as many of these pathways as possible — story for narrative memory, colour for emotional response, sound and action for sensory cues, spatial awareness for orientation, and visual coding for recognition. In short: designing visuals that teach, entertain, and stay in a child’s memory. But my journey with children’s design began long before my Master’s. Over the years, I’ve illustrated several children’s books and created my own comic book about the adventures of a Ukrainian boy in Australia — writing 20 stories and drawing all of the comic illustrations myself. These projects shaped my understanding of how we see, learn, and connect with visual narratives — a foundation that continues to guide my work today.
I’m honoured to be featured in the Ukrainian magazine The Woman, where I share my journey as an artist and as a Ukrainian woman living and creating in Australia. The article reflects on my creative path, the experiences that shaped my practice, and the way art has helped me stay connected to both place and identity while building a life on the other side of the world. Living between two countries has taught me that connection to homeland doesn’t disappear with distance — it transforms. Through my work, I carry memories, values, and cultural references from Ukraine into my life in Australia, creating a quiet dialogue between the two. Art becomes a bridge, linking landscapes, histories, and emotional ties across continents, and allowing me to feel grounded in both places at once. It is always meaningful to see this story resonate beyond my immediate community, especially when it reaches readers who may recognise their own experiences of migration, belonging, and cultural memory. I’m grateful to the editorial team for their interest and thoughtful approach to telling my story.
