For me, beauty is not what you see when you look at a sculpture, but what you feel. There are no rules in art, and there is no strictly defined process for creating a sculpture. The artist is his own master and creates his own world as he wants and as he knows it.

Generally, I start by sketching a drawing. Then, I sculpt that idea in clay. From the clay figure, I create a plaster cast, and from that cast I create a plaster sculpture. Then, depending on the resources I have, both physical and monetary, I use the plaster sculpture to create a final piece in a more permanent material, such as bronze or marble.

As a student, I worked from live models and focused on realism. This is what the professors required of us, so that we would learn the basics of sculpture. It was only in our fourth year that we were given the task of creating a sculpture in our own style. This was incredibly difficult, not only for me, but for every student – to find something original and creative. My first sculptures were in marble and wood, like the sculptures of my professors, but I did not enjoy working with these materials. They felt very restrictive to me. Then, one day, as I was sitting in my work area eating burek, surrounded by scraps of metal, wood, and stone left over from the sculptures I had made, the idea came to me to clean up the space by taking all the scraps and turning them into sculptures. This was the start of my original work. I used these scraps to shape pieces inspired by Macedonian “Folklor” – traditional dress, dances, poems, and songs. I enjoyed the idea that these sculptures were somehow ecological, turning waste into something beautiful and lasting.

After I finished University in 2002, I began to focus more on exploring the human form. My first solo exhibition, inspired by the work of some of the greatest sculptors and the beauty of the female form, consisted of female figures, which I sculpted in clay and then cast in polymarble. Over time, human figures have continued to provide me my greatest inspiration, but my work has become increasingly stylized, first with clear and clean forms that carry a distinct message, and now, in my latest work, with more expressive, surreal interpretations. My series “Pairs,” created in 2012, focused on the interconnectedness of things, such as “Wisdom and Curiosity” or “Father and Child.”

Next, I focused for a period on creating my own mythology by sculpting would-be heroes who reflect what I see as most urgent and important in modern life, such as a hybrid of man and rooster who calls the viewer to awaken to his connectedness with the natural world (“Awakening”) and a hybrid woman and bird who symbolizes the key role of travel in understanding the world and one’s own existence (“Traveler”).

During the pandemic, as my wife, daughter, and I were like a world unto ourselves, family inevitably became the dominant theme in my work. Every new sculpture became not only an experiment in style, form, and material, but an exploration of closeness and distance, physical and emotional.

I am now working on a new cycle I call “Humanism and Brutalism,” inspired by the history and architecture of the region of the world in which I live.