Kseniya Simonova’s sand art takes internet by storm

Something special may finally have come out of Simon Cowell's low-rent cabaret show, Britain's Got Talent. The franchise that lumbered the English-speaking world with dowdy crooner Susan Boyle has gifted Ukrainians their own, truly original star: a 24-year-old 'sand artist' called Kseniya Simonova.

Simonova took home $120,000 in June when she won Ukraine's Got Talent with a moving performance during which she manipulated her audience as much as her lightbox full of sand.

Telling the story of the Soviet Union's Great Patriotic War - their name for the fight on the Eastern Front against the Nazis in the Second World War - Simonova starts by drawing in her sandbox a couple sitting on a bench in a park. The soundtrack soon changes from a sentimental piano melody to a speech and crowd noises as German bombers destroy a city on the skyline. Simonova smites the doomed couple with a wave of her hand before drawing in their place a wailing woman.

The judges are moved to tears - presumably by Simonova's account of a conflict which killed almost 30,000,000 Soviets, rather than by any thoughts of how marketable the attractive young brunette may prove. (She is no 'hairy angel'.)

Since June, a YouTube video of Simonova's performance on Ukraine's Got Talent has become an internet phenomenon, recently passing the 2 million viewers mark. Besides positive comments on YouTube ("Truly she has the fingers of an angel" - phman53), the mainstream press has reviewed her art. James Donaghy wrote in the Guardian: "If we take it that art's purpose is to illuminate the world in a new way, provoke a reaction, somehow alter the consciousness of the viewer, then her work is a huge success."

Quite what the judges of Britain's Got Talent would have made of Simonova's performance is a moot point. Simon Cowell isn't known for his patience at novelty acts ("Rolf Harris with an etch-a-sketch? Get off!") and certainly not when they're eight minutes long.