Not sure how it happened, but I’ve been making something with my hands since I was a kid, but most of the work was made for ‘the desk drawer’. Even though I tried to ‘raft’ some of my works to my friends as gifts, one could find a free spot in my apartment for the new ones. All shelves and drawers were swamped with materials and weird-looking critters.

Long story short, my friends persuaded me to do a small exhibition, and surprisingly it turned out quite well.

I suddenly got noticed thanks to it and was granted an invitation to exhibit at the State Museum! And then I got invited to the TV! The regional one!

And it was in the same museum when I saw a strange-looking dachshund. I’ve been told it was made of wool. Dry felting? Let’s have it and try.

It turned out, though, that it’s impossible to buy decent needles and wool where I live. And I had nothing left to do but to get everyone around and one of the exhibition participants eventually gifted a set of needles and a batch of wool to me.

I roughly caught on to what the process should look like and started to study.

And at first, everything was falling apart, I poked it with a needle gently and accurately, but there was a feeling that didn’t change anything. I mean, it became clear right away how to do it, but how to do it well… And I really wanted to do something... captivating!

Generally speaking, there were no courses or master classes around, so I just studied the raw material for a couple of years by myself in an attempt to become good friends with it.

And it is probably not a coincidence that one of my favorite works was created during this period. It is probably not the most sophisticated, but definitive and experience-changing for sure.

It is hard to say how I came up with the idea. It is always a winding path, a kaleidoscope of thoughts and images. At the same time, there’s a chance that you come up with an idea that can transform everything. So I would rather say I don’t have a simple answer, and I simply don’t have time to fix such ‘quantum leaps’.

And felting the whale for the work was just half the battle. It was planned to illuminate the houses somehow, make stairs and miniature lambs. As a result, I made a lot of things from Fimo: some animal parts, houses and a small person inside one of the houses. It seemed like a more feasible task than taming new material.

Along the way, I asked smart people to help with lights and wires. I literally glued the ladder out of wire, I still worry if it can survive long enough. At the base is an ordinary stone from the yard.

Long story short, if you clamp the whale’s jaws, the lights come on in the houses. Inside the right house one could see a man covering his eyes with his hands. Small and awkward, he sits in his little box and imagines that whales and lambs surround him. And the big people who look in his window, yes.

And it is weird how those feelings from 2012 rhyme with the present.

As a result, I spent a good 3 or 4 months making it. And the speed of work has increased over time significantly, which helped a lot… At some point I realized that I needed a huge 180-cm whale and I made it in just a week! But I had to work every day without breaks for rest.

Looking back 12 years later, I have a handful of tricks and secrets on how to handle wool and achieve the desired effects. I even started teaching other people to do that.

I really would like to mate ceramics and wool in the future. Primarily because ceramics is my second love but I really like the contrast of texture and tactile feelings those materials have. I have been studying ceramics for a few years, creating the glazes myself and various unusual things. And I hope everything is going to turn out.

That said, most of my works including the latest ones can be found on my website. And speaking about interesting projects, I have the one we created with the artist Nastya Riskylisk. It’s called ‘Zveropticum’. You can find it on my social networks by hashtag #zveropticum!