Yuri Sidorov, Экстерьер, украшенный куклами / Exterior decorated with dolls

pictures (2021) from the website Tutu Art

Nevelsk is a port city in the Far East of Russia with about 12,000 inhabitants (2010), located on the southwestern coast of the island of Sakhalin ¹

Along a busy road just outside the city, there is a special creation in the form of an extensive collection of dolls arranged along the street, in the yard and in the trees belonging to the house located on the plot.

Life and works

This collection was created in 2014 by Yuri Vladimirovich Sidorov, who was born in 1955 and all his life has lived in Nevelsk. 

He had a job as a chief engineer on ships and then until his retirement he was an electrician in the company Rostelecom.

Sidorov acquired what would later become the house with the dolls in the early 1990s as a summer cottage. Around 2012, he and his wife Vera decided to live there all year round, because due to back surgery she had trouble climbing stairs in the flat where they lived.

The couple had four children and (in 2017) six grandchildren.

Decorating the house with dolls started in 2014. A grandson was found to have an allergy to a dust mite who loved soft toys and on medical advice all toy bears and dolls had to be removed from the house.

At first it seemed a good idea to donate the dolls to an orphanage in the area, but that was not possible because of hygienic standards.Then grandfather Sidorov came up with the idea of giving the dolls a place on the fence at the front of the summer house.

The collection of dolls, initially small in size, grew to about a hundred in 2021. Local residents and people from the city brought surplus toys. Sometimes they threw seven dolls at a time over the fence.

The collection, which includes all sizes of dolls, is not only displayed on the street side, but also on the fence along the side of the front garden. There is also a tree in the front yard, which is filled from head to toe with dolls.

Besides dolls there are also very large teddy bears and -lying on a fence- there is a large spotted dog, .

A lady from Japan brought a lion cub and asked to place it as high as possible, because after all, a lion is the king of animals..

Documentation

* Article and pictures (2021) on the website of Tutu Art

* Article (2015) on the website of ASTV

* Article (2017) on the website of Sakhalin Media

* Article (2019) on the website of newspaper BezFormata

Note

¹ The reviews in this weblog relate to  art environments in Europe. Nevertheless, characteristic sites in the Asian part of the Russian Federation are also included, this in order to give a balanced and coherent picture of the entire field of Russian art environments.

Yuri Sidorov

Exterior decorated with dolls

Nevelsk, Nevelsky-district, region Sakhalin, Russian Federation

can be seen from the road

Tracey "PicaPica" Shough, Jardin de Pies / Garden of the magpies

this picture and the next five 
from the video on Tracey Slough's  website 

The creative arrangement pictured above, gives an impression of the kind of artwork Tracey "PicaPica" Shough produces and shows in a variety of places in an around the French department of Creuse, where she lives in the small community of Chabrais, north-east of Clermont-Ferrand. The four images around show parts of an installation at a festival Les Sarabandes in Charente

Life and works

Tracey Shough was born in Birmingham, a city located in the Midlands in England. After her primary and secondary education she attended Dartington College of Arts near Totnes in Devon, South West England where she studied art from 1989-1992

From 2001 to 2007 she was affiliated with the Scottish organization Wild at Art which allowed artists from elsewhere to work and gain further experience in Scotland. Here she collaborated with schools and associations to create large-format artworks and other forms of art.Together with groups of children, she carried out projects in which walls were provided with colorful paintings.

For example, in 2007 she made a mural called The Long Goodbye, decorating the walls of the entrance and the platform buildings in the station of Invergordon, a small community along (an inlet of) the North Sea, in the north of Scotland. 

The mural depicts the story of the Seaforth Highlanders, 51st Highland Division, who left for France in World War II, fought there and, on retreat, ended up in St. Valery-en-Caux, where they were unable to make the crossing to England and were captured. A beautifully illustrated description of the project can be found on this website.

a decorated wall in Tracey's garden 

A crossing to France

After her activities in Scotland, around 2008 Tracey Shough left for France, where she would live to this day, displaying an extraordinary creative entrepreneurial spirit.

In doing so, she took a different direction artistically. In Scotland she made realistic murals and paintings, in France she started making art inspired by the series of TV broadcasts in 1998 by Jarvis Cocker entitled Journeys into the Outside in which he visited art environments, mainly those created by outsider artists. Tracey Shough herself also visited a number of art environments in and outside France.

Although Tracey is a professional artist, her distinct affinity for outsider art and her involvement in the creation of art environments warrants a review of her creative work in this weblog. Not only the interest in outsider art is characteristic of her further development as an artist, also the reuse of objects and the reduction of waste became an important theme in her work. From 2009 she took part in the collective Pica Pica that focused on these items.

Over the past around thirteen years, besides decorating the backyard of her house, Tracey Shough has created an extensive collection of artworks, ranging from assemblages and installations to smaller items, such as small art in boxes,  necklaces and bags.

The four images around give an impression of these creations (photos from her FB page)

In addition to Tracey's activity as a visual artist, it is also an important part of her activities to organize expositions, motivate others and help them making artworks without using new materials.

The sculpture garden of the Association Pica Pica

A  recent initiative taken by Tracy and some of her friends in the field of art, such as the artists Adam Varley and Ann Hollande, is the founding of an association that manages an art environment in the quality of a sculpture garden, called Jardin de Pies (Garden of the magpies).

this picture and the next three 

from picapicastuf.blogspot

The sculpture garden, currently in a first stage of development, is located in the hamlet of Peyroux-Vieux, a few km from Saint-Cabrais. Although the backyard of Tracey's house will also contain various creations, this is the garden she focuses on for the coming years

And of course, the sculptures are made of all kinds of materials that are no longer used or have become waste, in France often referred to as récup.

Located in a beautiful setting, he garden is surrounded by hedges and meadows, which are disappearing at a worrying rate and this is what the designers of the garden also want to draw attention to.

Documentation

* Website and FB page of Tracey Shough

* Weblog of the Association Pica Pica, with a page about the Jardin de Pies

Video

* Video (YouTube, 3'40") of an exhibition (February 2021) in the Creuse Confluence media-library, with commentary by Tracey Slough

Tracy Picapica Shough

Decorated garden (of the magpies) in Peyroux-Vieux  

Creuse area, dept Haute-Vienne, region Nouvelle-Aquitaine, France

Anatoly Varlamov, Деревянные скульптуры, ныне утраченные / Wooden sculptures, now lost

pictures in this post are screenprints
from the video in the documentation 

The image above shows a wooden sculpture depicting Russian astronaut Yuri Gagarin, as he could be seen in 2002 with arms flailing, standing on a pole in the garden of a house in the hamlet Vacarino, located in a beautiful area in the Tver region, a kilometer away from a turnoff halfway the M11 motorway between Moscow and St Petersburg

At that time the hamlet had only a few inhabitants, because most residents had sought their living and working elsewhere. Today (2022) no one lives there anymore

The wooden sculpture of Gagarin was created by Anatoly Alekseevich Varlamov, pictured above as he was filmed in 2002 for a video about him and his his art environment in Vacarino.

There is a limited number of articles devoted to him and his creations, all listed in the documentation, and none provides biographical information, so we don't know when and where he was born or in what year he died, like it is also unknown in what year and why he began to create the site..

The house where Varlamov lived, was located on a small hill at the end of the village. 

The photo above shows that the sculptures were situated on the roof of the house and in the garden. It's hard to tell them apart, but here are some more detailed images.

Varlamov used simple tools to transform the tree stumps he found in the area into sculptures. They therefore mainly have a little detailed look, what contributes to their charm.

His art environment mainly included historical characters associated with the origin and history of the Soviet Union.

The astronaut Yuri Gagarin has already been mentioned. The image above shows Joseph Stalin, with pipe and moustache.

There was a sculpture of a rider on horseback, depicting Vasily Ivanovich Chapaev, the hero of the Russian Civil War (1917-1922), as there was also a sculpture of Nikolai Aleksandrovich Shchors, an officer of the Russian Imperial Army, who became a commander in the Red Army during that civil war.

Other sculptures depicted the Russian fairy tale character Baba Yaga, a soldier, and other not so easy to identify personalities, such as the people in the plane below.

When in 2002 the video in the documentation was made, about half of the sculptures ever present were still intact. This video and the articles in the documentation provide a chronological sketch in text and photos of the decline of the art environment in Vacarino. 

As noted in one of the articles, its creator, Anatoly Varlamov, has since passed away. 

Documentation

* Article (May 2018) in Live Journal by Andrey Sinyushkin, with a report of a visit to the hamlet and a variety of photos 

* Article (June 2018) on weblog La Camorra, similar to the article above, but with one photo

* Article (June 2020) by Ilya Varlamov (no family) with many photos, including the interior of the abandoned house. When she visited the village there was only one inhabitant.

* Article (February 2021) on website Dzen by Alex Polyakov, who walked through a high layer of snow to Vacarino, and there had to realize that no sculptures were sticking out above the layer of snow anymore.

Video

* Video Varlamov's land (YouTube) made in 2002 by Film studio Fatherland directed by T. Karpakov

Anatoly Alekseevich Varlamov

Art environment with wooden sculptures, now lost

Abandoned hamlet of Vacarino, Tver region, Russia

what's left can be seen from the street

Avgust Ipavec, The priest and composer who created art environments in Lepena (Slovenia) and Vienna (Austria)

this picture and the next two give an impression of the site in Lepena, 

photos by Tiramisu Bootfighter,Galerie Ambulante, Facebook

The house pictured above is located in Jelena, a small settlement in the outskirts of the municipality of Bovec in northwestern Slovenia, not far from the border with Italy. The municipality of about 3100 inhabitants is bisected by the Soča River which flows through a valley of the Julian Alps in a landscape of great natural beauty.

Life and works

This house is owned by Avgust Ipavec, who was born in 1940 and would follow a career with a striking combination of activities. 

His family was poor, but when young Avgust turned out to have musical aptitude, his father bought him a piano, which he transported home in an ostrich cart.

After his primary and secondary education, Avgust Ipavec went to study theology and trained as a priest in Ljubljana.

In 1966, when he was 26 years old, he was ordained a priest and then he worked for some ten years in various Slovenian parishes. 

His penchant for music still abounding, he combined his priestly duties with a study at the Academy of Music in Ljubljana, where he graduated cum laude in composing in 1974.

After ten years of priesthood in Slovenian parishes, Ipavec went to Vienna with the intention of staying for a year, to take lessons at the Vienna Academy of Music to expand his skills in composing music.

He was now in his late thirties and was faced with the question whether to devote the rest of his life to the priesthood or to music. A conversation with a professor from the academy convinced him that composing music and the priesthood are not mutually exclusive, but rather quite the opposite.

That turned out to be true in a job Ipavec got as hospital chaplain at Vienna's Otto-Wagner-Hospital.. Composing music and sensitive attention for sick people turned out to go so well together for Ipavec that he remained connected to the hospital for the rest of his life.

Living in Vienna, but also owning a house in Jelena, Slovenia, meant that Ipavec often traveled from one place to another.

In Lepena, surrounded by mountains and beautiful nature, he found distraction after the stressful work with patients. He built a chapel and enriched his garden with sculptures and wooden creations, with poems and texts referring to the World War I, which had ravaged the area.

In Vienna, in the garden of the hospital, Ipavec has created seven wooden panels that can be uplifting and comforting for patients in moments of hopelessness. In the rose garden near the tuberculosis pavilion it is written: For every recovery a rose", the panel depicted below welcomes visitors with: Du bist meine Sonne (You are my sun).

a creation in the garden of the Otto Wagner Hospital

this picture from the website of the Erzdiözese Wien

Ipavez's compositions are mainly written for large ensembles and include many oratorios, cantatas and masses, such as the Missa Populorum (Mass of the Nations) written in four languages

He was awarded the Golden Medal of Honor by the Republic of Austria in 2006 for his music. In 2017, Slovenia awarded him a Medal of Merit for his musical creations and the promotion of Slovenian culture abroad.

Documentation

* A report on Facebook by Tiramisu Bootfighter, who in the autumn of 2022 made a tour through Eastern Europe with his Galerie Ambulante, visiting Ipavec's art environment in mid-November.

* Overview of Ipavec's most important compositions on Österreichisches Musiklexion

* Interview (2019) with Ipavec in newspaper Delo

* Article  (2017) in the newspaper of the Archdiocese of Vienna

* Wikipedia

Video

*  To give an idea of Ipavec's music, here is a video of a performance of part 1 of his Requiem, as performed in 2009 in Drežnica, Slovakia, by the united choirs from the upper Pošoče region, conducted by Marko Munih (YouTube)

Avgust Ipavec

Chapel and decorated garden

Jelena, Slovakia

Decorated wooden panels in the garden of a hospital

Vienna, Austria

sites can be seen from the street