Olya is pretty interesting herself. She is fascinated by the nexus between old and new, preferring to keep  her eyes open to the road in front, and her hands in the past. Traditional forms of beading are reinterpreted as both visceral, and glitteringly pretty.

She takes hearts and flowers to a whole new level.

 

 

 

Originally creating fabric jewellery, she soon realised that the durability of the materials was an issue for her, and started searching for something else. “And beads came up. I’ve come a long way from basic techniques and cheap beads to complicated techniques and high quality beads. It’s not a great business: to create an item takes days, sometimes weeks and even months… because it doesn’t come out of an assembly line. But I love what I’m doing.”

 

 

 

Olya lives in a very old house near Stanislavyv, Ukraine that she inherited, and plans to renovate it in her own way. It will become “my own fortress; an island of freedom. In spring I’ll start to grow a plant fence, ivy for the walls and vegetables in the orchard.” She loves to walk, and relishes that it takes her 45 minutes to walk into town, and 30 to walk to the forest.

 

 

She loves the slowness of it all, both of her chosen lifestyle, and of her craft. “In the old times, craftsmen created true art pieces, and the processing time could last for years.  That’s why I chose beading, where every tiny bead is stitched or knitted to the next one, and so on for hundreds and thousands of times. A rather meditative and long process.”

“I did not want it to be easy and fast. Easy and fast is a task for machines. My task is to make individual products and pay to it as much attention as possible.”

 

 

Olya’s Van Gogh series came from a chance email she received from young Ukranian fashion designer Lara Quint. “She just wrote me an e-mail, explaining that I’m the only person who can do exactly what she needed. I still don’t know where she found me. It was a great experience; I was free to do whatever I wanted and the way I saw it.” Lara’s work, including Nepinka beaded accessories, have since been featured in such fabulous places as Vogue.

 

 

 

 

You can find more of Olya’s wonderful work in her Etsy shop, Nepinka.