Ustina Yakovleva’s practice unfolds through long, durational processes — embroidery, beading and drawn line. She works without preparatory sketches, allowing each line or thread to gradually construct its own internal structure. Drawing on folk practices and cosmologies from northern Eurasia, her work resists the logic of productivity and perfection. Instead, it proposes a different kind of authorship — one where the artist observes and follows the intuitive process. 

Yakovleva’s insistence on slow, repetitive, and tactile processes recalls what theorist Laura U. Marks has called haptic visuality: an aesthetic rooted in intimacy, proximity, and material presence, prioritising touch and texture to the detached, optical gaze associated with Western visual culture.

Engaging with techniques that are traditionally gendered — such as embroidery, beading, and textile-making, which have long been associated with domesticity, craft, and “women’s work” in both Eastern European and global contexts, Yakovleva challenges these longstanding hierarchies, as well as those that have historically separated “fine art” from “craft”.

Yakovleva’s most recent works respond to ecological urgency of Bali, with forms that echo evolutionary cycles: medusas, molluscs, cell-organisms. In their delicate beauty, they invite us to consider what we truly want to preserve in the world.

Bibliography:
Marks, Laura U. The Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment, and the Senses. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000.
Parker, Rozsika. The Subversive Stitch: Embroidery and the Making of the Feminine. London: Women's Press, 1984.
Yakovleva, Ustina. “Biography.” Artwin Gallery. Accessed August 1, 2025. https://artwingallery.com/artists/45-ustina-yakovleva/biography