'So in a sense I actually became Ivaan'

Right before going into the operation room, with a 50% chance of survival, the late metal artist Ivaan Kotulsky asked his wife to carry on his artistic legacy.

"He didn't want his work to die along with him," says his wife, Eya Donald Greenland, owner of Atelier Ivaan.

"Every fibre in my being said I don't think that I can do that."

But two months after Ivaan died, Eya started to take on his work.

"...[P]eople would call and say, 'Oh, I'm so sorry to hear that he has died. You know, I really always wanted to have a belt buckle, or a bracelet, or some other piece of jewelry by him.' And then they would say, 'Is there anyway that you could do that for me?'"

Ivaan left over 2000 moulds of the individual pieces he created during his career and Eya knew the mechanics of it all from watching Ivaan and helping him when he was alive. 

One project led to another until Eya says she eventually got the message this is what she was meant to be doing.

Eya sold her house and bought a small commercial building, where she could work and have a gallery dedicated to Ivaan's art.

"So in a sense I actually became Ivaan," she says.

"I started speaking like Ivaan spoke and a lot of his humor started coming out of my mouth...All of a sudden I found I had become, not only a more outgoing person, but I had become a funnier person because I was, not imitating him, but I had put on a kind of a mantle of Ivaan."

Eya says it takes a huge amount of love and determination to reinvent oneself and to basically put on Ivaan's boots everyday.

She also says there's a fair bit of emotional risk in it too.

"Because when you're living somebody else's life for them because they're not here, you're also not living your own life. In the case of me and Ivaan, it has totally been worth it."