Jewellery for the heart and the mind
Ukrainian jewellery designer Veronika Moshura is now a refugee living in Wales. She told Jenny White why she hopes to find someone who will help her begin producing her art-inspired jewellery here in Wales...
WHEN Veronika Moshura fled her home near Ukraine’s border with Russia, one of the few things she packed was her jewellery moulds.
Veronika, 47, had a highly-successful jewellery business in Ukraine and she knew that if she left the moulds behind, it would be enormously difficult to restart the business wherever she ended up. So the moulds came with her on a terrifying journey that first saw her sheltering in the subways of Kharkov.
Veronika left behind a home she had bought just four years previously – a house on the edge of a lake with a garden she had planted with peaches, cherries and white mulberries. She had hoped this year would be her first harvest – now she did not even know if her home would stay standing.
Recalling the day she had to leave, she says: “Like all Ukrainians, I was woken by explosions at five in the morning – and it began. The first thing I saved was not money or documents, it was the moulds.
“I travelled with my eldest daughter, her boyfriend, a dog and a cat. We hid in the subway in Kharkov. The Russians were already in my house by 6am on February 24. After the subway, we lived in a basement for two weeks, but when the aircraft flew in with bombs, I could not stand it any more and decided to leave Kharkov under shelling, in winter. We drove past destroyed houses – it was cold and very scary.
“I drove 200km from Kharkov and every day I was waiting for news, because my other dog, Byron, remained in the occupied area. He had been taken in by a neighbour, but he needed to join me and I didn’t know how to do it.”
Eventually she found international zoo volunteers from Moscow who helped to take Byron to Russia. Her neighbour walked three kilometres and through the Russian military checkpoints and her partner travelled 3,500km across the frontline, got shelled, but got Byron to Belgorod then to Estonia. She was eventually reunited with him in Warsaw.
“When I found out that Byron had been rescued, I cried for the first time since the beginning of the war,” she says. By then it was the 47th day of the war – she was staying in the city of
Kropyvnytskyi and learnt that the houses of two of her neighbours had completely burned down.
“There were only seven whole houses on the street,” she says. “Even being in the centre of Ukraine, it was difficult to cope with the fear of endless air raids. The front was not advancing and it became clear that the war would continue for a long time. I went to work in a volunteer centre for refugees.”
In the second month of the war, news came of the liberation of Tsirkuny, her home village.
“I was happy for exactly three days, because after three days there were such bombardments that out of seven surviving houses only three remained,” she says. “One of them is mine. After that, Tsirkuny was for three months one of the most shelled territories. The chances of returning faded. There were no job prospects. I decided to leave the country.”
She chose to head for the UK, partly because she has a friend who lives between Cowbridge and Cardiff – but there were other factors as well.
“I chose from opposites – Germany is a country in which there is no place for hedonism, Italy and France have taken a fuzzy position regarding Ukraine. One thing has always attracted me to Britain is something that in my language it is called dignity, self-esteem, virtue, merit.”
She wrote a long and honest post on Facebook asking for somewhere to stay. In it, she briefly shared her life story, how her husband had died 13 years ago – something she had felt she would never get over – but she had healed herself by taking over his jewellery business and making it a success.
She explained that she is also a certified psychotherapist and a mother of two adult daughters, that she loves cooking, planting flowers and art and that she enjoys house parties where the talk covers art, politics and psychology.
She added: “My knowledge of English is like that of a smart dog – I understand almost everything, but I don’t speak. True, it was noticed that after a glass of wine I can suddenly discuss the common features between the art of the Renaissance and the Impressionists.”
The post hit home – she was offered a place to stay.
“It was such a long post,” she recalls. “My journalist friend said that it was too long. But I ended up in a wonderful family, where I was accepted with my two dogs.”
She still had to make the journey – and that took 60 days, thanks to multiple delays including the wait for a licence to import the dogs into
France.
“In the end I came, in a Honda SRV, on my own, with two dogs,” she says. It pains her that her daughters chose to stay in Ukraine with their boyfriends, meaning that every news report, every break in communication, brings added anxiety.
She is now settled with a family near Barry, but her whole life is in limbo. With a return to Ukraine currently out of the question, she hopes to start producing jewellery in the UK.
Her jewellery brand is called Salto Gioelli, which translates as “somersault” or “take a leap”. The business started life after her husband died, leaving her with his jewellery business. People urged her to sell it, but she decided to keep it alive, give it a new name and start designing pieces herself.
The brand’s new name reflected her urge to do things differently: “I wanted to create jewellery that would revolutionise the bling fashion in Ukraine – and I got it,” she says.
“My biggest inspiration was to prove that I could do it. In Ukraine, the jewellery business is 99% owned by men and former colleagues of my husband tried to convince me that nothing would work out and I’d better sell it.
“I wanted to prove to them, to myself and to my children that I could do it – and then I just imagined that I was making jewellery for a woman like me. Both form and meaning were important to me.”
She began by remembering and looking for examples of people who changed the rules, created something new and became successful.
“I was sitting in a cafe in a meeting – we were solving the issues of packaging and permits and above my table hung a picture of [pioneering abstract artist] Kandinsky,” she recalls. “I realised that I wanted to name a collection after him and make that collection with abstract shapes.”
That became just one of many collections, each with a different theme. Many artists will recognise the almost mystical way in which inspiration comes to her.
“When you sit with people who are very passionate about something, you become infected with this energy,” she says. “The same goes for my collections. If I am infected with something, passionate, I try to come up with a collection. It works especially well when I’m in love or when I’m shocked by something. Such jewellery sells better. It is a fact.
“But it often happens the other way around – clients ask something like that, they cannot explain what it is and I’m trying to understand.”
Now she is looking for people who will share her vision and help her to start producing jewellery here in Wales. She hopes to find someone who has the facilities needed to produce the silver jewellery from the moulds and a mentor who can help her navigate the process of marketing and selling jewellery in the UK.
She’ll be starting from scratch because 85% of her market was in Russia – and now she cannot bear to sell her jewellery there.
“I don’t want to have anything to do with Russia any more,” she says. “I’d rather go to work as a cleaner in the UK than get even a pound from Russia.
“I am ready for any job, but I would like to find a small jewellery producer and show them my models. Perhaps someone out there will be interested in this.”