THE SHORE 

Installation, 2024

This work is dedicated to a visual practice from my childhood—searching for special stones and sticks along the shores of rivers or seas. This practice turned out to be common among several generations of my family, who are deeply connected to a specific shoreline—that of the Sea of Okhotsk.

I grew up on stories filled with love for the North and Kolyma. However paradoxical this love may seem to me now, it has become an important part of my identity. In this work, I create points of contact with place and memory, which take shape through visual capsules from the family archive, photographs from my expedition to Magadan, and stones collected from the seashore.

This is a practice of physical interaction with the landscape, where, during an intuitive search, a moment of recognition occurs—a connection with a natural agent that inexplicably attracts and calls for action. To pick up. To take home. Among some northern peoples, it was believed that such stones choose their person and serve as powerful guardians. They were clothed, fed with fat, and adorned with beadwork when something good happened. Such talismans were kept for a lifetime and passed down through generations. I

n my family, the love for the North is inherited better than any artifact. Collecting stones along the shores of two bays of the Sea of Okhotsk, I repeated the actions of my mother, grandmother, and great-grandfather, recreating a connection that becomes a form of preserving memory and the strongest talisman.