Outsider Environments Europe: Christine Fayon, Maison d'artiste décorée / The artist's decorated house

April 04, 2025

Christine Fayon, Maison d'artiste décorée / The artist's decorated house

all images courtesy of Sophie Lepetit,
from her weblog

The image above, as well as the others in this post, show an interior decorated with a composition of all sorts of different small piles or hung objects, which can be seen as colorful spaces inside that together give shape to an art environment.

Life and works

This style of decoration is characteristic of the house of Christina Fayon, who was born in 1956 in Paris, where her parents worked as leather workers in a suburb.

Inspired by her parents, Christine started working with leather at a very young age. She was only three years old when she began making small creations, initially of course very simple ones, such as small leather bags that could carry her dolls.

As she grew older she also started making her own clothes.

Her preference for making her own clothes speaks to her need to live her life as she sees fit.

For example, in 1979, when she was in her early twenties, she decided to travel to Central America, knowing when she would leave, but not setting a date for her return to France.

She loved this freedom to come and go, to meet the unknown and herself.

And then, during that first trip she experienced a great need in herself to feel and absorb everything around her, habits, encounters, experiences, colors. This experience would also become the basis from which her artistry would develop.

And so it may very well be that this experience also made her decide to continue her life as an artist.

In any case, when she went to live independently, she made sure that the house she moved into in the Aveyron department in the south of France, also offered the opportunity to set up a studio.

When furnishing her own home, another special characteristic emerged. She turned out to be a master in the art of collecting all kinds of things with which she could surround herself and express her artistic nature.

Gradually, the interior of her home not only became a multi-coloured collection of various independent ensembles composed of all kinds of objects. Beautiful to look at, these small universes also inspired her to make new creations and guided her in her further career.

That career went well.

In her creations of textile paintings and textile jewellery, but also dolls, travel booklets, and postal art, she arranged a multitude of colourful fabrics in such a way that a coherent, inspiring composition emerged, a way of working that she gradually refined more and more.

During twenty years she also made a varied collection of leather bags.

The video below, made in 2020, shows Christine Fayon creatively active when she was in her early 60s and could look back on a life in which she travelled to areas in Asia and India and participated in many exhibitions of her creations, especially in France but also in Morocco.

A beautiful basis for further developments.