Varya Yakovleva — Les Femmes sauvages

Varya Yakovleva’s Les Femmes sauvages (2026-09-03) grew from a chance ink sketch into a full series of paintings, drawings and wooden sculptures that celebrate movement, experiment and small pleasures.

The project began when Yakovleva noticed a stray ink mark that suggested a woman “wild, like an animal.” From that moment of surprise she followed intuition rather than a plan: layering colourful, oozy ink on paper, adding short handwritten phrases in French — a language she had just started learning — and letting figures appear bent low to the ground, mid-dance, or paused as if listening to birdsong.

Those two-dimensional sketches didn’t stop on the page. Over time she translated the gestures into wooden sculpture, a move the artist says helped "complete the story" by giving the figures physical presence and weight. The mix of drawing, paint and carved wood lets the work read as both immediate and tactile: an ink mark that still feels alive when held in the round.

Yakovleva trained for a decade across art college, institute and directing courses and works across animation, illustration and object making. That range shows in the series’ cinematic sense of rhythm and motion — scenes that look like frames of an animated film yet stand alone as drawings or objects. For anyone interested in how visual art borrows the energy of music and movement, Les Femmes sauvages is revealing: the pieces move with a score you can almost hear.

The series sits beside Yakovleva’s weightier projects, which have addressed repression, women’s rights, violence and war, but she resists letting trauma dominate her output. She balances that material with what she calls "breaths of joy" — everyday life, cafés, streets and small moments of pleasure — and it shows here in the playful poses and handwritten refrains.

"what I do fills my life and saves me." — Varya Yakovleva

In Les Femmes sauvages, the artist lets chance lead and then builds deliberately: experiment, discovery, and a gradual move from paper into sculpture. The result is intimate work that feels at once improvised and carefully resolved — ideal for readers who like art that moves like a song and lingers like a memory.