Nina Mikhailovna Kotkova (1928–2000) was a master of hand and machine embroidery. She was born in Mstyora. She studied at the embroidery department at the Mstyora Vocational Art School (1943–1945). Nina Kotkova worked as a senior artist at the artel, and then at the Nadezhda Konstantinovna Krupskaya Factory.

The beauty of the local nature with its rich variety of plants inspired Mstyora embroiderers to create compositions. They also drew inspiration from songs, fairy tales, oral poems and significant events in the life of the country. As an embroidery artist, Nina Kotkova created both works with traditional floral motifs accompanied by birds and multi-figure narrative compositions, such as the panel “I am the Earth”.

For the panel, she used the embroidery technique called “Vladimir topstitch”. The imagery is based on the song “I am the Earth” by the famous songwriter Yevgeny Aronovich Dolmatovsky. The song is dedicated to space pioneers. In the Soviet Union, space exploration became the main dream of the country for a long time, and therefore one of the main themes in art. The great successes of Soviet cosmonauts and engineers were reflected in Mstyora embroidery.

The composition is vertical: in the center of the lower part there is a stylized image of the Earth in the form of a woman in a kokoshnik, a wide long skirt with festoons at the hem and an apron. To the left and right of her are the figures of cosmonauts in spacesuits. Above, the Sun shines, depicted as half of a large blooming flower. Rays, consisting of bouquets of flowers and leaves of various shapes, radiate from the Sun. The free space between the personification of the Earth and the Sun is filled with images of stars and rockets flying skyward.

The lower edge of the panel is decorated with a wide ornamental stripe consisting of a large chamomile flower in the center and shoots extending from it to the left and right with a wavy stem, elongated leaves, flowers of various shapes and five-petalled daisies. The entire composition and the ornamental stripe are enclosed in a frame of small triangles. A strip of red decorative fabric is sewn along the perimeter of the panel.