February 9th, Magnezit Cultural Center opened the final exhibition of the Contemporary School of Folk Art project by Satka.Lab.

Artists from Chelyabinsk Region, Kurgan and Yekaterinburg have offered more than 20 workshops in the four months of the project running at Art Satka, with over 150 participants among Satka residents. The final exhibition of the creative laboratory will show the whole variety of styles and techniques mastered at the workshops. These include scanography, overglaze clay painting, crafting with epoxy resin, jute and cotton string, dry wool felting, and many more.

“It is accidental that the official name of our exhibition reads like SLEEP in Russian. This is actually an abbreviation, which stands for Contemporary Ural Folk Art. We rolled with it and used it in the labels: artist names are put on stands that look like little beds. The exhibition is not about sleeping though. It is about art being cozy and humanly, making our everyday life a little bit brighter. It is facing the people. Art is what everyone can and should make, it’s a great tool for personal growth. So the little beds are more of a metaphor of how the exhibition is about Satka’s artists waking up,” says the project’s curator, art expert Egor Larichev, “I saw the town residents in a new light when I was preparing the exhibition. All pieces are quite interesting. I see the potential and it’s really worth unlocking. We are planning to print a book about it all sometime. We’ll have to wait and see what this book will look like.”

What the new book will illustrate remains for the visitors of the unusual exhibition to see and appreciate. Here, even the pieces made in the same technique are completely different and prompt different emotions and associations.

Coordinator and master of the folk art school Alena Shumkova observed that the participants became a one big and creative family during the laboratory experience.

“It has been a wonderful time and I’d love to do it again. My thanks to all the people who made this come true, to hosts and participants of the workshops for their hard work and invaluable contribution that made today’s exhibition possible,” said she.

“It is great that Satka has such a wonderful creative space as Art Satka. Everyone will find something to their liking here, no matter how old they are. My kids and I try to attend the events hosted there whenever we can, including workshops. I tried overglaze painting at the creative laboratory. First, we made clay figurines, then covered them with a special mixture, which was colorless initially. All the magic and coloring happened when the clay was baked, so the result was a surprise for each creator,” shared with us Galina Dvortsova.

The exhibition will receive visitors during open hours of Magnezit Cultural Center until March 23rd, admission is free.

You may remember that Satka.Lab project was launched on September 1st of last year and is implemented with the help of a grant from the Governor of Chelyabinsk Region (Fund for Support of Civil Initiatives of the South Urals) received by the Satka District Development Assistance Fund.

By the way, veterans of Magnezit Group and students of Satka’s A.K. Savin Mining and Pottery Vocational College took active part in all projects of the laboratory. The exhibition features their pieces too.

If you count all the time that took to create the pieces at Satka.Lab, it will run at two uninterrupted weeks of creative work by the laboratory participants.

Still, the project continues, offering a series of local history lectures, a cinema lecture hall that will be finalized with shooting a film about Satka; preparing online lectures on contemporary art, and an exhibition of Egor Lazurenko’s photo school Town in the Frame. New events are on the way.

Source: Magnezitovets. Photo by: Vasily Maximov.