Potato Elf

I created a series of costumes based on Vladimir Nabokov's novella The Potato Elf. Photographer Katya Belkina reinterpreted these images, creating a series of photographs.

I sewed these costumes using silk, velvet, padding polyester, gabardine, and organza. I also incorporated artificial flowers and ostrich feathers.

First, I created a mood board.

I created sketches using markers and pencils, translating my initial ideas into visual form. These sketches served as the foundation for my designs, allowing me to explore proportions, textures, and compositions before moving on to the next stage of development.

I created the details, carefully following the sketches and integrating them into the larger form. As I worked, I adjusted and refined elements to balance precision with creative intuition, ensuring that each component contributed to the overall aesthetic and structural coherence of the piece.

I assembled all the details and elements I created into a larger form, allowing the piece to take on a life of its own. This final stage of construction was a transformative process, where isolated fragments merged into a unified composition, reflecting the balance between chaos and order. I experimented with different methods of attachment, layering, and integration, ensuring that each component maintained its unique texture while contributing to the overall fluidity of the piece. The dialogue between materials—whether rigid and structured or soft and flowing—added another dimension, emphasizing contrast and harmony within the final form

I photographed each costume from four angles, allowing the photographer to study how the garments interacted with light, space, and movement. This step was crucial in shaping the direction of the final photoshoot, helping to refine the composition, atmosphere, and storytelling within each image.

The photoshoot of my costumes and photography itself have always been important to me, both as documentation of the final result and as an artistic vision—a reinterpretation of my work by another artist. Through photography, my creations take on a new life, detached from the physical space and reshaped by the lens, lighting, and composition. This time, I collaborated with photographer Katya Belkina, known for her ability to blur the line between photography and painting, transforming and refining the originally captured reality to an extraordinary degree. Her meticulous approach to digital manipulation and composition allowed the costumes to transcend their material form, becoming part of a surreal, painterly world. Each photograph in this series reveals the character—sometimes through the situation created by the artist, and sometimes through carefully chosen details that hint at a larger narrative beyond the frame.