I talk to... NIKA

age: 23
nationality: 'I'm from many places'
type of visitor: occasional
eating: smoked salmon wrap
drinking: jasmine tea

Every few weeks I notice her in the cafe, and wonder who she is, and ponder what she's doing.

She's very distinctive looking, and always works with a concentration so intense that I don't like to interrupt. But this time I talk to her, and find she's happy to chat.

I discover she's a sculptor, Nika Kupyrova. She's drumming away on a laptop in a cafe, rather than doing quirky 3-dimensional things in dank studios, because she's working on a funding application for a new installation. In the arts world, people are making tedious funding applications pretty much continuously; some enterprising artist should make an application for an art work that involves the continuous filling in of funding applications.

A graduate of Edinburgh College of Art, Nika lives in Glasgow. Her focus as an artist is on photography and space-based work, using found objects in particular. "My work glamorises domesticalities, offers a peep-show insight into a fictional habitat, lingers over routines, eccentricities and homemade erotica".

I rather like this image / installation, called pigeon. And there's a rather spooky clip of her installation keep here....