F. Spiktri, Le jardin de Spiktri/Spiktri's garden

all pictures courtesy of Jean-Louis Bigou

In the community of Montséret near Narbonne in southern France, an ensemble of sculptures is under construction ¹, which although there are links to outsider art, best could be qualified as an art environment.

Life and works

Born in 1971 in Nîmes (southern France), Florent Hamel grew up in a disadvantaged area of the city  and had a difficult childhood. He joined the graffiti scene, making realistic pieces on walls.

In this scene it is customary to work with aliases and Hamel invented his nickname Spiktri, he currently still uses as his artist name.

Spiktri refers to spiral, carré (square) and triangle, or life, male and female, concepts and symbols which stand for two antagonists in life, the masculine (violence, aggression, evil) and the feminine (peace, love, sex, good) and in line with this his work has two axes: aggressive art and love revolution.

Although the artist Spiktri never attended art classes, he masters the art of drawing rather well. A talented, energetic artist, alongside making murals, Spiktri began working with other techniques and materials, like doing paintings on canvas and making sculptures.

Because of his experiences with street art, but undoubtedly also because of his personality, he works quickly, as if in urgency. 

In creating his sculpted art works, sculpture street art as he has named it, he uses recycled material, wire, drift wood, as for example can be seen in a series of skulls on Saatchi on line.

the entrance

Since the art world has not received his work in a way Spiktri liked, he decided to take an independent position and seek his own way to promote and present his work.

So in 2010 he began transforming the rather large garden of a holiday resort he owns into an art environment, a project currently still in progress. The site, spanning some 13.000 m²,  has four holiday houses which can be rented in summer.

F. Spiktri is a fast working, prolific artist and the garden meanwhile has a varied collection of large, robust sculptures, mainly made from recycled materials.

The pictures give an impression.

Since Spiktri is a self-taught artist, his sculpture garden could formally be classified as an outsider art environment, but I doubt if he would be happy with such a designation.

So let's say this site is just an art environment tout court, or even better, it's Spiktri's garden.

Spiktri Street Art Universe

In 2021 Spiktri started a major project. In a disused building of a wine cooperative in Ferrals-les-Corbières, the Spiktri Street Art Universe museum opened on June 1st. The museum comprises four buildings, totaling 14,000 square meters, decorated with some 2,500 sculptures and installations, divided into 19 themes, which are referred to in the museum as "planets". 

One could say that this museum is an art environment with the quality of a decorated interior, but, once more, the designation street art universe does more justice to this manifestation of street art.

Documentation
* Website Jardins de Spiktri 
* Spiktri's personal website
* Article in regional journal Aube Times (November 2013, in English, on ISSUU, click to page 22/23)
* Article on Jean-Louis Bigou's weblog, 30-1-2014 
* Entry by Jo Farb Hernandez on SPACES website (July 2014)
* On the website of Sophie Lepetit (June 2017) a series of pictures also of various recent creations

Video

* Scenes of the site on the South France trip video by Serflac (YouTube, starts at 05.43, cannot be embedded here)

note  

¹ I am indebted to colleague blogger Jean-Louis Bigou, who pointed me to this environment and provided both pictures and information

F. Spiktri
Jardins de Spiktri
1010 Route de la Mer
11200 Montséret, dept Aude, region Occitanie, France
can be visited from April-October,
in winter only on appointment

Fellicu Fadda, Sculpture garden

pictures courtesy of Antonella Fadda from the website ghilarzaedintorni

above picture is a still from her video, not available anymore

Ghilarza is a community of almost 5000 inhabitants, located on the Italian isle of Sardinia.

Life and works

Born and all his life living in this community, Fellicu (actually Raffaele) Fadda (b. 1932) was educated in a family that respected religious values, a respect Fadda shared.

Fadda had a job as a mason, but at age fifty -in the early 1980s- he entered another career and became a self taught sculptor.

His sculptures mostly have been made from basalt, abundantly available in the region. Fadda would make sculptures of animals, but in general one finds depictions of people, often with a religious connotation or reflecting Sardinia's earliest and recent history and its traditions.

At first Fadda made small busts, and then when he felt he was on the right track, he began making larger creations, both stand alone ones and ensembles.

The sculptures with a religious connotation offer a variety of holy persons, shepherds at the manger, depictions of love and charity, compassion, motherly care, love between people.... 

Epiphany

Sardinia is known because of its nuraghi, ancient stone towers of various sizes, created by stacking bricks without any grout. Fadda's sculpture garden has references to the megalithic secrets on the island, such as a megalithic stone construction, kind of a dolmen, with three standing stones and a cover stone, lifted with instruments Fadda constructed himself without any study of archaeology.

Another stone construction made by Fadda is reminiscent of the megalithic structures on the isle of Malta.

Among Fadda's sculptures that refer to Sardinia's recent history we find a statue of Sardinian authoress and Noble prize winner Grazia Deledda (1871-1936) and a statue of Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937), the Italian philosopher and political leader, who when young lived in Ghilarza (The house where he lived now is a museum dedicated to his life and works)..

Currently (2014) in his early eighties, Fadda for over thirty years has been active in making sculptures and I suppose the number of his works is in the hundreds.

Documentation

* Fadda´s personal website, edited by his daughter
* Article (undated) in the Sardinian online newspaper Làcanas

* Article and a series of photos on the website of Francesco Galli

Videos

* Trailer of Un Facteur Cheval en Sardaigne,  movie by Giuseppe Trudu (YouTube, August 2012,  

2´48`') with Fadda talking about life and works, voice over in French

* Video (2021, YouTube, 1'45") by SardTub

Fellicu Fadda

Sculpture garden

Ghilarza, Sardinia, Italy

visits on appointme

George E. Howard, Inscriptions on stone tablets in his shell garden

all pictures courtesy of Ann Davey

In February 2001, George E. Howard's Shell Garden in Southbourne, UK, a site beloved by locals and holidaymakers, was suddenly destroyed.

Howard loved to adorn his site with inscriptions, mostly carved into stone tablets. Here is a selection of these inscriptions, from the weblog Cream Tea Club, republished here with friendly permission of its author Ann Davey.

Above inscription says:

It's not the man who knows the most 
who has the most to say.

It's not the man who has the most 
who gives the most away

And this tongue-twister:

Never trouble trouble till trouble troubles you

Keep on smiling and the world smiles to

A quote from Shakespeare:

To see much is to learn much

About a wise owl:

A wise old owl lived in an oak

The more he saw the less he spoke,

The less he spoke the more he heard.

Why can't we be like that wise old bird.

And to conclude:

The dawn of the morn for glory,

The hush of the night for peace,

In the garden at Eve says the story,

God walks and his smile brings release

More inscriptions on the Cream Tea Club website. Enjoy !

New weblog by Jean-Louis Bigou

Authored by Jean-Louis Bigou,  in november 2013 a new weblog has been published, entitled De l'art improbable aux jardins insolites dans l'Aude et les environs. Portraits de personnes qui interviennent dans leur environment, par l'objets ou de sculptures. (From improbable art to unusual gardens in the Aude and surrounding areas. Portraits of people who intervene in their environment by objects or sculptures).

Aude is a department in the south of France with a centuries-old history, in the Languedoc-Roussillon area, best known by its cities Narbonne and Carcassonne.

picture from Jean-Louis Bigou's weblog 

Art improbable

Art improbable is a rather new term. As is best demonstrated by above picture, it has to do with (ensembles of) smaller objects used by people to decorate their place of living.

Not all items in this category will be covered by the description. As Jean-Louis Bigou says: Pour être improbable, la création ou l'installation doit avoir un caractère, tout au plus décoratif mais surtout pas volontairement artistique (To be improbable the creation or installation must have a character, which at best is decorative, but certainly not intentionally artistic).

This can be considered as an interesting approach, which might open a new sub-field in the area of outsider art environments.

a scarecrow, picture from Jean-Louis Bigou's weblog

Art environments

As regards art environments the new weblog since November 2013 already has paid attention to a number of creations in the south of France, such as those by René Escaffre, Robert Mathey and Joseph Donadello, which in France already got internet publicity on a national level.

But then the new weblog also has the story of sites about which in France on a national level the internet only has limited information. A good example is La Maison Fleurie  in Lézignan, created by Antoine Puéo. (On my blog a year ago I had a short message about the proposed demolition of the house).

The same goes for the sculpture garden by Georgette and Hubert Bastouil.

The boundary between art improbable and art environments obviously being fluent, it will be exciting to see what insights and information the new blog will bring us.

Pierre Martelanche, Le Petit Musée / The Small Museum

the museum
pictures are screen prints from the video 

by Roanne local tv, referred to in the documentation

Forgotten since the 1920s, the work of a French self-taught sculptor after ninety years has been re-discovered.

Life and works

Born in the small community of Saint Romain la Motte (near Roanne, Rhône-Alpes area in France), Pierre Martelanche (1849-1922) was in his early twenties when the 1870 German-French war raged, an event which may have affected him deeply.

He had various jobs, but ultimately he became a winemaker.

During many years of his life there were no indications that he would become a self-taught artist, but then around 1900, at age fifty, he began making sculptures.

The story is that one day, coming home from work, he cleaned his shoes from the clay he had collected while at work and got the idea to make a vase out of this material, an item needed in the household.

True or not, it was the beginning of a new phase in his life which would last until his death: making sculptures from clay as a self-taught artist.

He created stand alone sculptures, but also a number of ensembles of people and plates with high reliefs.

A number of these plates have been attached to the walls of a small cabin in the garden of the family house, which gradually became entirely filled with plates and sculptures, his Petit Musée.

Martelanche's art work has a highly allegorical character.

He was a strong advocate of education for all children, especially for girls, he demonstrated his preference for the republic and laïcité (i.e. the situation where religion has no place in public life, in France nowadays a basic principle).

He proclaimed the great value of justice, peace and progress....

the inscription reads La Paix Par Tous (Peace By All)

The walls of the small cabin that houses the museum got covered with inscriptions that express his views.

It is quite possible that the basis of his creative work wasn't so much the urge to make beautiful sculptures, but rather the need to bear witness to his social views.

The reports about Martelanche, referred to in the documentation, make no mention of his feelings regarding the horrors of the 1914-1918 world war, about which he must have learned at older age.  

In 2011 the site has been rediscovered 

After Martelanche died in 1922, the Petit Musée fell into oblivion. Gradually, other than the family, no one knew of its existence.

This lasted for some ninety years. Then in June 2011 a great-grandson approached Jean-Yves Loude, an ethnologist who with his wife Viviane Lièvre and a donkey, in preparation of a book, traveled the region.

The couple saw the importance of the work and alerted relevant stakeholders in the region, who all became interested in saving the creations for the future.

Activities to save the sculptures 

An Association of Friends was formed, on behalf of whom consultations were held with various museums to see whether they could accommodate the sculptures. This Association in 2017 got the yearly awarded regional prize for the best heritage conservation project, including the restoration and enhancement of Martelanche's terracotta sculptures.

Consultations took several years, but in February 2021 it was reported that the sculptures would be housed in the Joseph Déchelette Museum in Roanne, a town some 10 km south-east of Saint-Romain-la-Motte, so they will stay in the Loire area where Martelanche lived.

Documentation
* Weblog of the Association of friends
* Articles in Jean-Yves Loude's weblog, here and here 

* Article "Martelanche: l'Art de l'Aventure" in Le bruit qui court en Roannais. Magazine Roanne et sa région (10-4-2018)

Video 
* Video by avp-diffusion for Roanne local TV (Daily Motion, 4'01")

* The association of friends has published a video that presents the works of Martelanche in a systematic way (Daily Motion, 7'36", January 2014)

first published  January 2014, last revised June 2023

Pierre Martelanche
Saint Romain la Motte, dept Loire, region Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes, France
extant, but not (yet) available for visits by the public