About me

My name is Olesya, and I create under the name Dreaming Shell.

I have always admired life, especially in its smallest and often invisible forms. That curiosity led me into science, and I spent over fifteen years working as a molecular biologist, studying how living systems function at their most fundamental level. That interest has not changed.

What changed is the way I respond to it. Science allows me to understand how things work. Art allows me to express how it feels to witness it.

Dreaming Shell grows from that response. My work is shaped by a sense of awe toward the world — especially, the living world and the forms it leaves behind — fragments, textures, and structures shaped by time. I try to translate these impressions into ceramics and mixed media objects that balance function and form, often meant to be used and experienced rather than observed from a distance.

There is also an element of play, an essential part of me — the side that looks for the unexpected, the irrational, and the unfamiliar. I am drawn to objects that feel slightly out of place, forms that resist explanation. Making something without reducing it to logic or fixed meaning is fun and drives much of what I create.

I move across techniques, but they are all part of a single approach: observing, interpreting, and making. Each piece is created individually, without repetition, and with attention to the person or context it will belong to.

Dreaming Shell is grounded in admiration rather than control. I translate a small part of that experience into material form. This world is open to you.