Outsider Environments Europe: Władysław Szymczyk, Wnętrze ozdobione drewnianymi kreacjami / Interior decorated with wooden creations

October 24, 2025

Władysław Szymczyk, Wnętrze ozdobione drewnianymi kreacjami / Interior decorated with wooden creations

this image and the next three are screenshots
from the movie in the documentation

The image above shows the front of a nursing home in Miszewo Murowany, a community in Poland, not far from the city of Plock. It also shows a person approaching the building with some kind of cargo.

The cargo in the cart includes several pieces of wood and the person pulling the cart is Władysław Szymczyk.

Life and works

Szymczyk was born in 1943 to a farming family in Tasto, Poland.

From a young age, he had to live with the disability of being deaf, which also meant that he didn't learn to read or write and that he couldn't express himself properly.

This led to his admission in 1964 to a nursing home in Miszewo Murowany, near Płock, when he was in his early twenties.

For many years Władysław Szymczyk worked on a farm managed by the nursing home.

However, in 1996, in his early fifties, he began working with wood, an activity he was likely able to undertake when the nursing home for the benefit of the residents had set up a working space with the necessary equipment.

The surrounding images give an impression of how Szymczyk worked with wood.

Before he starts working on a piece of wood, he makes a drawing, as shown in the image above, which gives a general idea of what the creation should look like.

His wooden creations are usually left unpainted and they are lightly sanded to give the wood even more expressiveness.

The the constituent parts of the creations are very realistic.

For example, when Szymczyk makes a vehicle, its wheels can always turn; and if he makes a bus, the wooden equivalent will be equipped with doors that can open and close, and also with a double row of seats, visible by lifting the roof.

this image and the next three from the website Znalezienie

Active as a woodworker since the 1990s, Władysław Szymczyk must have amassed a substantial collection of small-scale wooden creations.

If this collection has a place in the nursing home, it can be considered as an art environment in the category of interior decorated with woodcarvings.

And if that's not the case, then Władysław Szymczyk still deserves an article in this blog, because he is one of the three main characters in the film series The Others. Art Is Where No One Looks

The films were shot in the summer of 2021 and their presentation took place on December 10, 2021 in a cinema in Płock.

In addition to Wladuslaw Szymczyk, the triumvirate includes Wlodzimierz Roston and Wacław Rędziński, who have already been described in previous posts.