Maria Rodriguez, El jardin / The garden

 

view from the beach

A house facing the beach in Guainos Bajos, part of Adra, a community of Almería in Andalucía, Spain, has a front garden which is fully decorated with structures embellished with seashells, shapely stones, plastic figures and various plates fitted with proverbs.

This is El Jardin, an art environment created by María Rodriguez (1936-2017).

Life and works

Her full name is María Ascensión Rodríguez Rodríguez. Born in 1936 she married in 1956 and had three children. All her life she was interested in art, which she gave way by collecting small sculpted items she bought in local shops.

 this picture and the next ones

by Eloy M. Muñoz Suarez

Around age 50, in the 1980's, this interest got a new twist when she began adding decorations to her garden, a plot of some 60 m² (646 square feet) that separates the house from the beach.

This garden became fully packed with Rodriguez' creations.

People who create shell decorated items in general use a cement mix to secure the shells. Maria Rodriguez prepared the cement herself by using sand from the beach mixed with cement powder and water. 

The base on which the shells and other elements were attached mostly had a pyramidal shape, which gave the collection its own characteristic appearance.

Rodriguez regularly patrolled the beach to collect additional decorative material, not looking for specific shells but just gathering what she encountered and what she liked..    

Plates with texts

Apart from a variety of self-collected sea-shells and other found items, Rodriguez` creation is characterized by plates that are provided with texts, such as proverbs, personal messages, warnings and other sayings.

Here are some examples:

No es mas sabio aquel que sabe muchas cosas 

sino aquel que hace muchas cosas con le poco que sabe 

The one who knows many things is not wiser 

then the one who does many things with the little he knows.

The text on the upper plate reads  

Pide a Dios que donde mires veas alegria

lo que toques sea amor

lo que sienta sea paz

y hacia donde camines sea la felicidad

Ask God that wherever you look you see joy

whatever you touch is love

whatever you feel is peace

and wherever you walk is happiness

The lower plate has a text that refers to a seat which is included in the structure: 

El que se siente en este sillon será bendecido por Dios

He who sits on this chair will be blessed by God

And finally this example

Mi felicidad consiste en que se apreciar lo que tengo 

y no deseo en exceso loque no tengo

My happiness is that I know to appreciate what I have 

and that I do not want  too much what I do not have

Maria Rodriguez passed away September 26, 2017. In the years that followed, family members maintained the garden.

Documentation

* Article by Jo Farb Hernandez  on SPACES website
* Article by Roberto Perez, "María Rodríguez: una escultura singular", in Bric-a-Brac (2018, nr 1)  

* Website of Spanish TV (August 2015) with video (cannot be embedded here)

* On the website of Sophie Lepetit a recent (October 2023) series of photos

Video
* Video by picon39 (4'13", YouTube, January 2008)

first published September 2015, last revised August 2024

Maria Rodriguez 

El Jardin
Guainos Bajos, Almería, Andalucía, Spain
can be seen from the beach

Antoni Maciá Cassany, Espai singular Maciá / Maciá's singular space

view from the road

Formerly known as Zoo Emporda (Zoo of the Emporda region) this art environment currently is named Espai singular Maciá (Maciá's singular space) after its founder Antoni Maciá Cassany (1918-2007), who realized a variety of single-handedly built structures on the property ¹.

structure on the left side of the entrance

unless stated otherwise the pictures (2014) are screenprints from 

the video by Serflac, published here in agreement with the author 

Life and works

Born in peasant family in Vic, a centuries-old city in Catalonia (Spain), Maciá at age sixteen began working at a local cement factory. Two years later he was drafted in the army. The Spanish Civil had begun and Maciá had to take part in the fighting.

portrait of the artist
this picture from the website Espai singular Masiá

He was wounded and returned to Vic to recover from his injuries. The city of Vic is a center of ecclesiastical activities and of producing saint statuettes. Maybe inspired by this activity, the young man became interested in modelling in clay. He succeeded in getting permission to follow art lessons at the local School of  Arts without formally registering and soon showed an innate skill in modelling, which made him decide to settle as a sculptor in Barcelona.

Here at first he earned a living for himself and Josefa Rovira Olmo he had married in 1942, by making and selling figurines of clay. Later he got a job as an assistant of a famous sculptor, but gradually he felt hampered in his development as an artist. Fallen into debt because of an exposition of his work at his own expense, in 1955 he moved to Begur a community along the Costa Brava.

It was the era of the initial development of tourism along the Spanish Mediterranean coast, as promoted by the government, and Maciá went to work in the field of building hotels.

the "Pajaro", a 6 m (19.5 ft) high bird with a worm in its beak

Creating an art environment

In 1967 Maciá bought a plot of land of some 17.000 m² (4.2 acres) in the community of Regencós where the family went to live. Although located in the countryside, Maciá probably realized that he could engage here in the various activities he wanted to pursue in life, acting in his own way and own spirit, integrating gardening, animal husbandry, architecture and sculpture.

the "rotunda", an open aviary, as well as the 

building with the three-pointed roof behind

Step by step animals were added to the site, domestic ones such as those living on a farm, but also exotic ones, such as monkeys and an emu.

To give shelter to these animals Maciá designed structures in a specific architectonic idiom, which he single-handedly constructed. He made these structures by piling cemented stones into the desired form and then covering the resulting model with a layer of cement, both internally and externally.

In particular in the 1970s Maciá exerted a lot of energy in transforming the site into an art environment/zoo.

left the "Caja de instrumente musical", 

in the middle the "Oruga"

The ensemble of structures on the left side in above picture, the Caja de instrumente musical. is a small and bare version of a never realized larger structure Maciá dreamed about. His idea was that it would produce musical sounds generated by a machinery activated by streaming water, all items beautifully illuminated.  

The sculpture in the middle of above picture, La Oruga, is the icon of the site. Its highest point rising some four meters (13 ft) from the ground, the construction was meant to be climbed by visitors so that they could be photographed once above.

a peasant and a mermaid

The site has only a few realistic sculptures of animals or humans. There is a Catalan peasant as in above picture, flanked by a mermaid, an ensemble still present at the premises.

Maciá made a number of such sculptures, but these were primarily intended to sell to visitors or to people who were interested in his artistic work. Since no records were kept, its unknown how many sculptures he sold and where they went. 

a structure meant to house monkeys, but never used a such

After Maciá died in 2007 the site has remained closed for a number of years. It must have suffered some degradation.

However, it has reopened as is evident from the video that was made in the spring of 2014, which shows a maintained site. At that time there also was a website that reported about activities which took place in 2015, such as workshops in dance, music and drawing, concerts and dance performances.

In later years the site must have closed again.

Situation in late 2021

The picture above and the one below, made in October 2021 by Tiramisu Bootfighter, who traveled through Spain in the context of his project La Valise, Galerie Ambulante, show that the site at that time still was in fair condition, although some larger structures were beginning to show decay

Documentation

* Website Espai singular Maciá (in Spanish, English and French
*  The site got a scholarly review in: Jo Farb Hernandez, Singular Spaces. From the Eccentric to the Extraordinary in Spanish Art Environments, Seattle (Raw Vision, SPACES, San José State University), 2013, pp 316-325 (An abridged version is available on the website of SPACES) 

Video

* Scenes of the site (2014) on the Provincia de Girona (Catalunya) trip video by Serflac (YouTube, starts at 18.50, cannot be embedded here)

note

¹  to my knowledge the only source in the public domain about this site is the review by Jo Farb Hernandez (see documentation), so I acknowledge that this post relies on Jo's research

Antoni Maciá Cassany

Espai singular Maciá (aka Zoo Emporda)

Regencós, Girona, Catalonia, Spain

on the road between Regencós and Pals

after 2015 no activities have been reported

Jean-Pierre Moreau, Récup'art

picture (October 2017) by Tiramisu Bootfighter (Facebook)

(project Tour de France Insolite)

Insert Récup'art  in a internet search engine and you will get over half a million of hits which mainly refer to activities in France in the field of making artistic creations from recuperated material.

Jean-Pierre Moreau is among the half a million results.

(for privacy reasons private address and telephone number 

have been removed from this business card)

Life and works

Born in 1941, Jean-Pierre Moreau in his professional life was active in a factory in Limoges as a welder and as operator of a lathe and of a milling machine. In these technical jobs he learned to work with metal and iron and became acquainted with the specific characteristics of this materials.

this picture and the next two  

from the weblog "Parceque c'est beau"

In 2000, some years before he retired (2004), without any prior artistic training, Moreau began making installations and sculptures from excess iron and other material. He made life-size items, such as the installation in above picture.and small ones, such as the insect depicted below.

Currently, Moreau has produced some 300 sculptures and installations, which are displayed on a plot of land of 5000 m² (1.2 acres) he owns, named Récup'art and located near the house where he lives.

Because of the carefully maintained greenery and many trees the site has the allure of a park and Moreau likes to welcome visitors and show them around. Moreau's park is located in the small rural community of Saint-Priest-Taurion (some 2700 inhabitants) near the city of Limoges in the south-west of France.

Visitors will see all kind of real or imaginary animals and monsters, strange machines, robots, and installations like a sailboat or a wind-turbine, all made from recuperated items. 

They also can meet Don Quichotte (in two versions) and Sancho Panza (one version to date)

As can be seen in above picture, the park also houses a mill. Here Moreau keeps his paintings made in the style of painters he admires, such as Picasso, Dali or Giacometti, 

To date this art environment  hasn't raised much publicity among those interested in outsider art. It is mentioned in some regional touristic websites, a local journal and an occasional weblog. 

Documentation

* Article on weblog Parceque c'est beau (August 2014)

Jean Pierre Moreau

Récup'art

Route du barrage de Chauvant 
87480 Saint-Priest-Taurion, dept Haute-Vienne, region Nouvelle Aquitaine, France

visitors welcome, especially in summer