Marina Bulan is the founder of Cedarella, a two-year-old venture that turns out eye-catching wood products such as jewelry, kitchen decor, children’s toys and, most recently, metre-high outdoor planters that double as home street-number indicators.
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Marina Bulan is the founder of Cedarella, a two-year-old venture that turns out eye-catching wood products such as jewelry, kitchen decor, children’s toys and, most recently, metre-high outdoor planters that double as home street-number indicators.
Marina Bulan is the founder of Cedarella, a two-year-old venture that turns out eye-catching wood products such as jewelry, kitchen decor, children’s toys and, most recently, metre-high outdoor planters that double as home street-number indicators.
Ahead of immigrating to Winnipeg a decade ago from their native Russia, Bulan and her partner thought it would be prudent to conduct some research on their soon-to-be new home, a city they knew next to nothing about.
Imagine their surprise as they were viewing the 2007 surrealist film My Winnipeg, which comically blends historical facts about our burg with what Winnipeg-born writer/director Guy Maddin has termed “mystical hypothesizing.”
Woodworker Marina Bulan started her business, Cedarella, after taking a cabinetry course at Red River College Polytechnic.
(For instance, there is no proof that, as reported in the award-winning flick, Winnipeg is the sleepwalking capital of the world, and that residents keep keys to their former abodes on their person in the event they turn up there during a bout of somnambulism.)
“We assumed it was a documentary and were both like, wow, Winnipeg is such a crazy place,” Bulan chuckles, seated in her clean-as-a-whistle garage workshop. “I mean, our first winter here, we half-expected to see dead horses’ heads frozen in the river, like it shows in the movie.”
Bulan, now in her early 50s, grew up in Rostov-on-Don, a port city of about one million in southern Russia. At age 18, she moved to St. Petersburg, where she earned a master’s degree in chemistry at St. Petersburg State University.
Following that accomplishment, she studied graphic design, a field she concluded was more to her liking.
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Bulan met her partner, who also has a design background, in the early 2000s. They eventually opened their own design studio in St. Petersburg, and were still running it in 2014 when the Russian army invaded Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula, about a six-hour drive from Bulan’s hometown.
Because of what was occurring in Russia — with the war, yes, but also in regards to the Putin government’s negative stance on LGBTTQ+ rights — the two of them decided it wasn’t the country they wanted to live in any longer, Bulan says.
Source: Read the original article on www.winnipegfreepress.com