About me and my work

I was born in a town, but I mostly grew up in the countryside. You could say I started designing things as a child: every spring, you'd find me painting the pigsty, the trees and the doors of our house for Easter. Even the pig seemed happier once I'd spruced up its home. Grandma handed me a paintbrush and Dad an angle grinder, and over time I learned to use them to make art from everyday objects.

In high school, I started doing hair. People liked spending time with me, even if I wasn't particularly good at the job. Interesting women came through those salons, and I would listen to them for hours. It made me want more.

I enrolled at the University of Agronomic Sciences and Veterinary Medicine in Bucharest. In my head, it made perfect sense: having grown up in the countryside, I could work on a farm. I'd find something to do. But life doesn't always turn out as we imagine. After four years of university, I felt time slipping through my fingers. I was clearly in the wrong place.

All the while, I kept painting and drawing, but I felt like an impostor. I painted over the same canvas again and again because ruining a new one felt almost criminal. Being an aspiring artist with an engineering degree felt much the same: I'd never even dared to set foot in an art school.

To ease that feeling, I began working with discarded or donated objects. Giving old furniture a new life brought a satisfaction that a fresh canvas never had.

I learned as a child to reuse everything and find a purpose for things that seemed ready for the bin. Trousers torn while playing outside didn't mend themselves, and we didn't buy new chairs just because a leg had broken.

I've been sewing with my grandmother for as long as I can remember. We spent much of the winter indoors, making quilts, skirts and trousers, or repairing whatever people in the village brought her. I started by threading her sewing machine, then learned to wind the bobbin. When I was about six or seven, I even managed to stitch my sister's finger.

My sewing career was briefly put on hold after that. But I remember the following summer for the first doll's skirt I made on the machine. By then I'd already learned to crochet, turn a broom into a Christmas tree with newspaper tinsel, and cut old clothes into strips to make yarn for rugs.

I could spend a lifetime telling stories about how those experiences taught me to reuse things and think sustainably, long before sustainability became a fashionable word. We never threw away a bag. We used it again, and eventually sent it on a visit to relatives.

I sometimes wonder what Grandma would say if she could see people leaving wooden furniture on the street and replacing it with cardboard. I have a fairly good idea, and I can't write it here. But once she'd finished, I know she'd tell me to pick it up and repair it. That's when I feel I'm doing something right here.