Art in La Gacilly (Brittany)

La Gacilly is a town situated between our Cottage by the Lac au Duc, near Ploermel, Brittany and the large town of Redon in the south of the region where we used to own a gite. So many a Saturday we would be driving through on the way to do the gite change over clean - boy I have fun on my holidays. The gite is long gone - it paid for our apartment and the deposit on the house in the Languedoc, not bad for an investment of £20,000. But anyway visits to La Gacilly are still freqent to see what's happening in the arts and crafts there.

As you can see from my photos they have a thing about photos. Each year 3 or 4 photographic artists display their work out in the open on building facades or mounted along the street, topics vary. The first shot was from a really charming collection of photographs of all manner of local groups of people, this group was the local fishing club..

Above is the large building that houses the Yves Roche institute (Yves was France's equivalent of Anita Roddick, creating a chain of shops promoting natural cosmetics, which are natural products made just outside the town). The windows have dissappeared over the years as it's become clad in ivy and this year huge reproductions of photographs of the devastating floods of 1994(?) were on display - this is a tall building so the scale is stunning.

As well as this open air art there are several artisans working in the town, there are permenant shops for woodwork, leather work, glass blower, potter, painter on leaves! soap maker, calligrapher etc. And then each year there will be some other crafts people ensconced in other shops let out short term, so it's always interesting to see whats new. Several bars, pizzerias, creperies complete this busy little town, well worth a visit.