WORK

Kurak · QizUl · Connections · My body · Voice · Invisible Results

Selected series, 2021-2026

Necklace, earrings, 2 bracelets

Photography: Zhenya Volkova

Kurak is a series of jewelry inspired by the traditional Kazakh patchwork technique used to make quilts and carpets.

The series brings together inherited craft practices and contemporary materials. Visible stitches, raw edges, and industrial elements become signs of time, use, and transformation. For me, these works are wearable objects that carry a connection to ancestry, memory, and cultural heritage.

Kurak

Photography: Lena Sorokina

body object

QizUl

The project was inspired by the tradition of giving a newborn’s shirt as a wish for the birth of a son.

QizUl combines the Kazakh words qiz (daughter) and ul (son). The work reflects on the cultural preference for sons and the gender stereotypes that begin shaping a child’s life from birth.
In Kazakhstan, some girls are given names that express a family’s hope for a son. Names such as Ulbolsyn (may the next child be a boy), Ultuu (give birth to a son), and Ulzhan (the soul of a boy) carry wishes not for the newborn herself, but for the birth of a future son.

Drawing on personal stories, cultural traditions, and national statistics, the project explores how gender stereotypes can shape a child’s identity from the very beginning of life.

The work was exhibited in TIREK, a group exhibition presented by the UN Women Regional Office for Europe and Central Asia as part of the regional programme Every Woman and Girl Matters, in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan (2024) and Almaty, Kazakhstan (2025).

Photography: Kamilla Barysbekova

Connections

Created from recycled textile ropes and metal zipper elements, the works reflect on the relationships that shape our lives. Connections grow, become stronger or heavier, break apart, and are sometimes repaired—often leaving visible traces. Like electrical circuits, they carry energy, but they can also become overloaded, fragile, or disconnected.

For me, making this series became a slow and meditative process. By bringing together recycled materials, tangled threads, and fragments of metal, I explore the invisible connections that shape our lives.

The Connections series began with a landscape that stayed with me long after I left Lahore, Pakistan. Tangled electrical wires stretched across the city, humming with energy, chaotic yet essential. Their dense, imperfect networks became the starting point for these wearable objects.

Photography: Kamilla Barysbekova

Metal zippers are the primary material throughout the series. Their weight, rigidity, and tension create a physical sense of pressure and restraint. At the same time, they connect separate elements, becoming a metaphor for the body’s ability to endure, heal, and remain whole.

My Body explores how the body is shaped by care, pressure, and resilience. Through contemporary jewelry, I reflect on the visible and invisible forces that influence the way we experience our bodies.

The recurring form of the placenta runs through the series. Before birth, it sustains every human life equally, regardless of gender, origin, or future. For me, it represents a state of care, protection, and equality that exists before social expectations and inequality begin to shape our lives.

My Body

Photography: Kamilla Barysbekova

Hair object

Voice

Traditional Kazakh hair ornaments were adorned with silver coins that produced a delicate ringing as the wearer moved. Their sound announced a woman’s presence before she entered a room.

Here, the coins are sealed inside recycled textile. They retain their form, but can no longer ring. The work reflects on what happens when that sound disappears, and on what remains when a presence can no longer announce itself.

Photography: Kamilla Barysbekova

3 brooches

Invisible Results

The brooches take the form of flowers. Growth is almost impossible to notice from one day to the next, yet it never stops. Like many meaningful transformations, it becomes visible only with time.

Invisible Results is a reminder that not everything that matters can be measured or seen straight away.

I made these pieces thinking about the domestic, the decorative, the overlooked. The brooch — perhaps the most 'decorative' of all jewelry forms — felt like the right form for a series about things that are present but not noticed. The flower, too: something that grows, blooms, and is taken for granted.

Invisible Results asks: what would it look like if we counted everything?

Some forms of work leave no immediate trace. They unfold slowly, through repetition, care, and time. While they are happening, they often go unnoticed, even though they quietly shape people, relationships, and lives.