The objects we buy are supposed to tell us something about who we are. But they don't tell us half as much as the objects we make, as even a quick flick through Home-Made Europe reveals. Here are everyday things people have fashioned with their own hands. Heaters, hammers, anchors, rat-traps, barbecues, showers and goalposts. They range from the pitiful – a child's grill for corn on the cob, rigged out of wires bent over tea lights – to the technically impressive – one man made a fridge. This is a catalogue of human resourcefulness.

But these folk artefacts are neither critique nor subculture, neither knowing nor community-minded – they're just a raw human impulse. Their makers do not consider themselves designers, nor do they aspire to be. And yet they create moments of rupture in a world that, as Arkhipov points out, is created by specialists.
The Guardian

Vladimir Arkhipov’s new compendium is illustrated with the stuff of trash or treasure, depending on where you’re standing.
The Russian artist and collector criss-crossed Europe, tracking down ordinary people who have addressed their basic household needs with extraordinary inventions, often involving parts of other, less essential household objects.
Chronicling his discoveries from Albania to Wales, Arkhipov reveals a nautilus machine constructed from a car’s axle and a drawing stool; an heirloom ladle moulded from a melted-down German bomber, and a ski-bob made out of an old bicycle.
‘Many of these objects look like art,’ says Jeremy Deller, the Turner Prize-winning artist who wrote the foreword, ‘but in actual fact art looks like, if not aspires to be like, these objects.’
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Vladimir Arkhipov's follow up to Home-Made Contemporary Russian Folk Artifacts is a fascinating collection of improvisation, ingenuity and bricolage from across Europe.
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