About
I work in silver and brass, by hand, mostly by fire.
Every piece begins as molten metal and keeps the evidence: seams, scars, the accident of the pour. I don't polish these away — matte for honesty, polish for presence. The form is finished when it stops pretending to be perfect.
Each work exists once. When it leaves the studio, it is archived with the city it moved to, and never repeated. I no longer take commissions; the practice moved past making things for briefs toward making things that insist on existing.
These works are not for everyone. They wait for their person — and then they stay.
Yulia Novikova is a self-taught artist working in wearable sculpture under the name YUNOV. She began working with metal in 2020; her first ring — brass with fragments of silver — remains in the artist's collection.
Working in hand-cast silver and brass with handmade niello, Novikova makes each work in a single copy. Sold works are archived with the city of their private collection; the archive currently spans Georgia, Israel, the UK, Serbia, the UAE and wider Europe. In 2025 she closed her early edition collection; its metal is being reclaimed for "reborn", a series of one-of-a-kind works cast entirely from the melted-down past.