Born in Moscow, Russia, I’ve lived in Edinburgh for the last 15 years and now call it home. In the past, I’ve worked with different media such as pastels, charcoal and watercolours but with the arrival of our daughter and the (occasional) downtime that entailed I rediscovered the linoprint and totally fell in love with it. To me, it’s a perfect medium, which combines a thorough planning and methodical labour-intensive process with an element of a complete surprise- you really don’t get to see the final result until you draw your picture on a bit of lino, then carve it, then ink it and roll it out onto a bit of paper. I also like the fact that linocut allows for pretty much endless possibilities of experimenting with colours, always with subtly different and often exciting results.
I find my inspiration in things that interest me: music, people, fashion – vintage fashion in particular: 50s-70s fashion and culture are my latest obsession and I’m currently working on recreating the aesthetics of old fashion magazines in linoprint.
To make my linoprints I mostly use Picasso’s reduction method, aka ‘suicide cut’ (so called because the lino gets carved away colour by colour and essentially destroyed in the process so you need to get it right first time – such a rush? !)
All of my prints are designed, cut, inked and hand printed by myself using a bamboo barren and the back of a wooden spoon and, most recently, a printing press, built by my very talented husband.