CHAMPAIGN, Ill. (WCIA) — A U of I graduate left her job of roughly 10 years to pursue her passion for ceramic art.

Anastasia Tumanova knew it was the right decision. And now, everyone knows…

Anastasia is a University of Illinois graduate. She was majoring in Graphic Design. After she finished school, she moved to San Francisco to pursue a career in Technology & Design. Anastasia stayed with this career for over 10 years. Throughout this whole time, she was doing ceramics on the side only as a hobby. Little did Anastasia know that she would fall in love with it.

In 2015, Anastasia made a big change in her life as she decided to change her career path and gave ceramics her full attention. 

In 2020, Google reached out to Anastasia to ask for some help with creating a mural for their lobby in San Francisco HQ. According to Anastasia, Google had a few other artists who pitched ideas to them but the company wasn’t quite sold. Members of the Google team said they wanted to find an artist that could create a design that worked well with historic features of San Francisco, their HQ in San Francisco and the Google logo. 

Anastasia’s design was exactly what the team was looking for.

“I make art about the natural surroundings,” said Anastasia. 

When working on the art installation for Google, Anastasia was inspired to create a mural that would be visually evoking – a living wall made out of ceramics.

Because of the challenging circumstances due to the COVID-19 pandemic, it took Anastasia about six months to produce all the ceramic pieces for the Google mural. After that, it took her three more days to install the pieces onto the wall.

“I was so happy,” said Anastasia when asked about how she felt after she finished the project for Google. “Because of the responses from the Google team. I thought they were really excited and happy about the work that I made for them.”

“I felt so grateful for the opportunity to do something like this because it is like a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity,” she added.