Valery Vykvyragtyrgyrgyn is a Chukchi artisan who lives in Anadyr', the capital city of the Chukotka Autonomous Okrug in the Russian Far East.  Valery creates both carved sculptures and engravings using materials such as whale bone, walrus tusk, and reindeer antler. Most of the pieces you will see here are slices of walrus tusk with designs engraved on them and color rubbed into the grooves as a final step.

    The designs Valery creates are usually drawn from his own childhood experience of living in Ryrkaipii, a reindeer herding village on the northern coast of the Chukchi Peninsula. They depict scenes from the everyday life of reindeer herders and sea mammal hunters of coastal Chukotka, with a slightly historic flavor.

    Take a look below, and on subsequent pages, at Valery's work:
 

This scene depicts a woman sitting at the entrance to her iaranga. Iaranga is the name of the tundra dwelling of the Chukchi.  The iaranga is made by stretching a cover of sewn reindeer skins over a frame of sturdy wooden poles. A hole is left at the top to serve as a chimney, and the cooking hearth is situated at the center of the dwelling. The woman is tanning a reindeer hide with a special scraping tool made by attaching a small metal blade to the center of a sturdy, curved wooden handle. She is able to grasp either end of the handle and scrape downwards on the hide. The greyish shapes you see around the base of the iaranga are small boulders serving as weights to keep the dwelling secure in the high winds that batter Chukotka.  There is a ring of stones in front of the iaranga that probably represents an outdoor hearth. Behind the iaranga is a reindeer sled, loaded up with winter items for storage during the summer. All around the scene, Valery has depicted the tufted hummocks of grass and moss that are so typical of the tundra, and in the background you can see the mountains of Chukotka, which in person are a breathtaking sight.

Here is a similar scene of a woman working outside her iaranga, only in this case it is the iaranga itself that she is creating. You can see that the iaranga is only half-covered; the woman is sewing together the rest of the skins that will finish covering the structure. Small boulders are standing at the ready to be placed around the base when she is finished.  A loaded sled stands to the side.

This tiny engraving (about one inch wide) is actually made on a piece of mammoth tusk -- believe it or not, remains of the extinct mammoth make a plentiful raw material in Chukotka. This engraving simply depicts the iaranga itself, standing in the mountainous tundra.

Click here for the next page of Valery's work

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