this picture (September 2021) and the next three screenprints from Google Maps
The Scottish art environments reviewed so far in this blog, such as those created by Alex Batchelor, Frank Bruce, William R. Bisset and the anonymous maker of the shell decorated property Shelleen, are all situated in small towns or rural areas.
However, the Scottish art environment discussed in this article, is located in the large city of Glasgow, and not in a back street, but along the London Road, one of the major thoroughfares in the city.
August 2008
Life and works
The creator of this art environment, Jim Donnelly (also James Donnelly or JD), was born in 1941. He became a trader at a market in Glasgow called Barras, a special market focused on the sale of handmade products. He also developed as an outsider artist, mainly working on a variety of paintings in a personal style.
Donnelly was probably married, because available documentation states that a daughter died when she was 26 years old. However, in the following story about the part of his life that began in his early sixties, no wife appears.
On November 8, 2002, a large group of police officers searched Donnelly's house in connection with stolen jewelry belonging to the mother of Princess Diana, who lived in a house on the island of Seil, 185 kilometers north-west of Glasgow.
The search of the house was probably correct in a formal sense, but it was based on a rather vague description of the perpetrator, in which the Glasgow police believed they recognized Donelly, who as a market trader was more or less a public figure in Glasgow.
The raid by the police deeply affected Donnelly. As a suspected thief, he felt he was being treated very unfairly and moreover, the search of the house had caused all kinds of irreparable damage to the house.
September 2012
The police saw no reason to improve the situation with some form of compensation and continued to adopt a formalistic approach.
Donnelly, for his part and given his artistic background, saw no other way to express his disappointment and find compensation for his sadness, than by transforming the space in front of his house into an area of protest expressions.
It became a project that continues to this day and the site is regularly provided with new expressions. The first manifestation was relatively modest in size, but gradually an extensive and colorful set of signs emerged that filled the entire strip along the street in front of the house.
The protest signs include various texts that refer to the theft of the jewelry or speak of illegal activities by the police, but there are also images that express how Donelly experienced the event, for example an image of the face of a man with the word gagged between his lips, snakes wriggling on the sign, heads of men with their finger in front of their mouth to indicate that there is silence .....
July 2019
In December 2015, a petition was sent to Nicola Sturgeon, at that time political leader of the Scottish National Party and First Minister of Scotland, asking her to pay attention to the conflict and to do justice to Jim Donnelly, but this did not lead to action.
Documentation
* Article by Katherine Sutherland in Raw Vision #116 (December 2023)
In the Russian village of Vysokoklyuchevoyten, located south of St Petersburg, there has been a house with all kinds of decorations, especially a large sphere on the roof.
Life and works
This singular architecture was created by Oleg Petrovich Arkhipov (1939-2010), who worked all his life in St Petersburg as a machine maintenance engineer.
He was in his early twenties when Yuri Gagarin on April 12, 1961 made the first space flight around the world, and young Arkhipov was deeply impressed by the dawn of the space age. He collected all kinds of stamps and postcards related to space.
this image and the next two (2021) by
Oleg Everzov in his article about the site
When in the early 1970s he inherited from his father a wooden house in the village of Vysokoklyuchevoyten, he came up with the idea of adding an an extension that would express space travel as a new, very special happening in world history.
The idea did not let him go and in the mid-1970s he indeed started working on a construction project on which he would work for more than twenty years. Arkhipov and his wife Nina Vasilievna went to live in the wooden house that he had inherited from his father.
The structure he had in mind was a creation in which he wanted to express in his own way what kind of images space travel generated in his world of thought. It should be a house with a sphere on the roof surrounded by a large circular ribbon.
As the very first image shows, Arkhipov indeed succeeded in producing such a representation.
One can say that the upper part of the resulting creation evokes associations with the world as a globe as it exists in space, or also something like a capsule with which space is explored. The load-bearing substructure is made of reinforced concrete, where the design of the extensive windows, made of brick and bottle bases, is particularly striking.
He also constructed a landing site for spaceships on the area around the art environment. However, the aliens did not come.
Arkhipov, who had no training in construction or architecture, had to pay the costs of purchasing building materials from his salary and this was only possible with a small amount each time. This made it a long-term project.
His wife had no problem with her husband being so busy with his construction work, but in his family Arkhipov's efforts were seen as a waste of time and energy.
Disaster struck shortly after the construction was completed in the mid-1990s.
A fire completely destroyed the wooden house and also damaged parts of the house with the sphere.
Rebuilding the wooden house was considered, but in the end Arkhipov and his wife decided that it would cost too much. They found temporary shelter in a rented house and then bought their own home.
The house with the orb was left unattended and no one in the family felt like renovating the abandoned property.
Arkhipov and his wife both died in 2010. Their son and daughter did not accept their father's inheritance and the house's decline continued.
Ten years later, in 2020, the ball fell off the roof. No aliens landing, nor happy ending .....
the cabin and the welcome sign pictures are screenprints from the video in the documentation
La Garriga is a Spanish community with about 16,000 inhabitants in the region of Catalunya.
Located about 42 km north of Barcelona, the little town is surrounded by a beautiful hilly and wooded area, where it is pleasant to make walks. Various routes can be found on the internet and the art environment La Cabana del Nans, reviewed here, is also located along such a route. .
a gnome still present
Life and works
The story begins with Enrico Giro, a resident of La Garrida, who owned the piece of forest where the Gnomes Hut now stands. He used the site as a place to relax, alone or with family members. To provide some shade, he stretched a cloth between some of the trees around..
One of his relatives was his son-in-law Esteve Torrents Grau, who in the 1950s would transform the place into an art environment.
Esteve was a construction worker by profession and he knew what bricklaying entailed, but above all he had a creative mind and was a dedicated person.
He got the idea to turn the place into something special, discussed his ideas with his father-in-law, who agreed with the project that Esteve had in mind, namely a kind of sculpture park that would give the area its own artistic character and, above all, where the other family members and their children could enjoy themselves.
And so the creation of the art environment started, a project that was implemented by using no more used items and materials available in the area as much as possible.
a damaged sculpture
Esteve's first action involved the shade cloth. He envisioned that the shelter should become a real hut and starting with that, he first made a roof, as if it were a parasol, which led passing hikers to refer to the place in the forest as the mushroom.
Later, Esteve added walls to the roof and finished the rear part of the hut, for all parts using old and surplus materials.
He then turned his attention to decorating the site. One of the first projects was to create a series of gnomes, including a scene from Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, a choice that is understandable given the number of grandchildren in the family. This collection also led to a reference to gnomes in the name of the art environment.
Nowadays there are not many gnomes left to be seen, because their manageable size made them easy to steal.
the gorilla
a totem pole
Esteve also made all kinds of creations that depicted animals, such as a variety of birds, a group of pigs, a frog, a deer, a lion, a huge gorilla, but also a fantasy creation of a huge dragon hugging trees.
In the spirit of imaginative creations, he also made an enormous structure based on a tree stump with the appearance of an angry person, with branches for arms and a face with eyes, a nose and a mouth in the bark.
And then there were special personalities on display, such as King Kong and a hunter with a bow and arrow.
The site also had two windmills, but these have now disappeared.
a lion
After Esteve Torrents Grau died at some moment (the date is not available on the internet), the art environment was less systematically maintained. The sculptures became neglected and some fell prey to vandalism and damage.
However, his family has now announced that they want to start a restoration project to revive the dart environment and restore it to how it was before. A website has been published in which this plan is explained in more detail and all kinds of information and photo material from the past are available (see below).
Documentation
* WebsiteThe Gomes Hut by the family of the Esteve Torrents Grau, with info about the renovation; this website also has a series of some 50 photos that give an impression of the various sculptures that decorated the art environment
* Review of the site in Jo Farb Hernandez, Singular Spaces II, (5 continents editions, 2023)
* Weblog of photographer Marco Pachiega, with an article (November 2022) about the site and a series of photos
