About Nina

I was born and spent my formative years in the heart of St. Petersburg and from the beginning was well aware of its mythical qualities. Water seeped into every corner of it and was an actor of the city-scape, warping it’s perspective. The watery prisms of the northern skies refracted and multiplied the faces of the city, mixed with historical and literary myths locked forever in an aqueous mirror...

  It is no wonder that mirrors took such a central place in my life. 

In 1995 I found myself in London, where at the workshops of Peter Binnington I was shown the arts of glass gilding, engraving and reverse-painting on glass. I learnt about Verre Eglomise with all its complexity, multitudes of layers, names and uses. From then on it became my main occupation, obsession and passion.

 For a while I lived and studied the old-new technique in England, then moved to California, then to St. Petersburg again, then Germany, then France, now back to Germany… Every place enriched the knowledge of historical methods and uses of the technique as well as the understanding of vanity, self-reflection and image-making. Every place posed new challenges and brought new ways of looking at and through the glass. 

And like the shards of the infamous troll mirror, mine are mostly whole but scattered around the world, living among different people, in different cultures and languages - reflecting, reflecting, reflecting…