Michel Nivon, Jardin aux alignements de pierres expressives / Garden with alignments of expressive stones

 

images courtesy of Sonia Terhzaz, from her website

Montchenu is a small community with about 450 inhabitants (1999) in southern France.

The village is located some ten kilometers south of Hauterives, where the well-known Palais Idéal of facteur Cheval is located. Montchenu also has an art environment, but this one is hardly known.

Life and works

The site was created by Michel Nivon (1944-2022), who was a farmer. He was not married and lived with his sister, who was also unmarried, on the family farm where they had both grown up. The farm was located on a dead end road in Montchenu.

Probably partly due to the strict upbringing he had, Nivon was a modest man, who had no worldly desires and generally stayed near the farm. As a result, it is not clear whether he ever visited Cheval's Ideal Palace. He must have heard of it, because references to this creation can be found in the space around the farm that he was going to decorate in his own way.

Nivon started his creative project in September 1989 when he was 45 years old. 

As the images show, he placed on the plot of land rows of interconnected wooden posts, which marked the lines along which expressive stones were situated, on the ground, on the posts or on the beams connecting the posts.

In terms of design, this is a way of arranging the stone decorations that, as far as I know, has not previously been used in the field of art environments.

It may be assumed that the set of alignments has gradually increased in size over the years, as Nivon succeeded in finding  in the fields in the vicinity of Montchenu what he considered to be characteristic stones. The available documentation states that the exhibited stones depict shapes such as a seated figure, a smiling head or a minaret.

The concept of stone must be taken broadly, because flower pots were also eligible to be included in the alignments, sometimes provided with pieces of glass or inscriptions.

In recent years, Nivon has no longer been involved in expanding the site, but only carried out maintenance. He died in April 2022, his sister died the following month of May.

Since they have no children, inheritance is problematic, because it must be determined whether any members of the family are still alive. It is not known whether the local government wants to focus on preserving the site. For now, it must be assumed that Nivon's creation will be lost along the way.

Documentation

* Article (2022) by Sonia Terhzaz on her website Cartographie des Rocamberlus

* Article (2008)  by Bruno Montpied on his weblog Le Poignard Subtil (Nivon's art environment also has a review in Bruno Montpied's inventory Le gazouillis des éléphants, 2017)

Michel Nivon

Garden with alignments of expressive stones

Montchenu, dept Drôme, region Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes, France

can be seen from the street

René Morice, Alignements des structures en pierre / Alignments of stone structures

picture (2017) courtesy of Sophie Lepetit
from her weblog

The above pictured structure of stacked stones, a creation by René Morice, is part of a large series of built stone structures, predominantly situated in roadside alignments.  

The following screenprints (via streetview, 2013) give an impression of the specific lay out of the component parts of this art environment, that is located in Kerbescond, part of the community of Pommerit-le-Vicomte in Brittany, France.

Taking the first road left on the road from Pommerit-le-Vicomte to Saint-Gilles-les-Bis (D65), one soon arrives at a first triangular part of the line-up, left from the road just before a junction.

Going left at the junction one passes by Morice's farm on the right, with an arrangement of stone structures at the front of the living house, and also ....

..... at the left of the road, opposite the living house,  another triangular arrangement of structures ....

......and then past the farm the next parts of this art environment are located left and right of the road, with the alignment on the left side of the road extending approximately 200 meters. 

Life and works

René Morice (1930-2023) became a farmer. living in the outskirts of Pommerit-le-Vicomte, a small community of some 1800 inhabitants near Guingamp in the Breton department Côtes-d’Armor.

Once retired, probably around the turn of the century, he experienced that he had little left to do and so in 2005 he started cleaning up the space around the farm where he lived. 

In the process, he began to tidy up a fountain in front of the farm, leaving a pile of stones that somehow put him in a creative mood

one of the numerous stone structures

this picture and the next two (2017) courtesy of Sophie Lepetit

So Morice started to put bricks together, using cement, forming structures that sometimes depict a certain character, and sometimes only have a spatial shape. He made single, stand-alone structures, but usually he united a number of structures into ensembles, sometimes using iron as a connecting material. 

 A number of ensembles and stand-alone structure were arranged in more or less triangular spaces near the farm, but it is a special feature of this art environment that most stone structure were arranged along the road in alignments.

This can of course be related to the space that Morice had at his disposal, but it is also tempting to see a relationship with the alignments of neolithic stones that form a characteristic (and famous) spatial element in Brittany.

Other observers, watching the creations in line, got an association with a crowd, gathered at the edge of the road, waiting for the passage of any event. 

But perhaps this is all too far gone, given Morice's statement in an interview: 

 

J’ai fait ça grossièrement, sans trop m’appliquer ! Si j’avais su que cela attirerait les regards, je me serai appliqué un peu plus (I did this roughly, without applying too much! If I had known that it would attract attention, I would have applied a little more).

Morice gave this interview in 2017. At that time he was 87 years old and he had worked for about twelve years on the art environment, which since the start in 2005 had got a large size, with its alignments with a length of over 200 meters. 

So in his late eighties Morice decided to end the further expansion of the site, partly because of his age, but also because the company where he bought the cement was closed.

He passed away in December 2023, at age 93.

Documentation

* Article  (October 2024) on website Tipeek

* A large collection of pictures in the weblog of Sophie Lepetit (June/July 2017), alignments, a first series of structures and a second series of structures, 

* Article (January 2017) in regional journal Ouest-France

* Article (January 2017) in Actu France

René Morice

Alignments of stone structures

Kerbescond (part of Pommerit-le-Vicomte), dept Côtes-d’Armor, region Brittany, France

can be seen from the road