Stevenson
29.06 - 10.08.2024
Cats. Eyes. Cat-eyes. Leaves. Petals. Peaches. Fish. Fishnets! Women’s skirts. Worries. Witticisms. Angels’ wings. Cigarettes. Stubble. Pubes and penises. Verse in cursive. Lovely boys and their buoyant bums. Bumholes, for that matter. Birds. Blooms. These are the treasures that Hylton Nel has accumulated over some sixty-odd years of art and pottery, of which a fraction are on view at Stevenson in a mini-retrospective titled Things Made Over Time.
Nel was born in N’Kana, the copperbelt of Zambia, in 1941. He grew up on a farm deep in the interior of the Northern Cape. His father ranched cattle on the plateau and, in the valley, grew wheat, peanuts and fruit. As a young man, he attended art school at Rhodes in Makhanda, then went on to complete a Master’s at the Royal College of Art in Antwerp in the 1960s. A photograph of Nel in his home, taken by Pieter Hugo, is papered to the gallery wall. Looking closely, we can see two works Nel painted during his time as a student in Belgium: one dark, watery street scene and, just above his head, a self-portrait that reminds me of a similar work by a young Picasso. The exhibition opens, as it were, with an especially precious piece from this time: a brown ceramic tiger, complete with glass googly eyes, a premonition of the many cats to come. After hitch-hiking across Europe to see some of the art he had come to love from books in the flesh (on the same wallpaper, there’s a snapshot from this trip, taken in a public garden in Athens), Nel settled for a while in England, where he lived with another South African ceramicist, John Nowers.
Returning to South Africa in the early 1970s, Nel taught ceramics and ceramic history in Gqeberha for eleven years. He had his first solo show there in 1978, of which only a few pieces are gathered here: a marbled dish, an earthen plate with curly-cues, a sgraffito turtle and a man’s behind in cobalt oxide. Later, he lectured in drawing in Cape Town and Stellenbosch. On his fiftieth birthday, Nel moved to Bethulie with his partner Bernard Wilke. As he tells it, he saw an eagle in a pepper tree and knew that the cottage was a good place. The return to the isolated rural life of his youth coincided with his decision to dedicate himself to the studio full-time.
In the 2000s, the studio moved from Bethulie to Calitzdorp, where Nel stays to this day, but what has remained consistent over the past three-and-a-half decades of prolific making is Nel’s dating system: each piece is signed with its exact firing date. The result is something of an art historian’s dream, and it’s because of this that Nel’s gallerist and curator, Marc Barben, decided to arrange the works on show chronologically. The linear framework occasions serendipitous connections. Moving across the room, one notices colours or techniques that dovetail from one to the other. A lilac glaze is tested, first, on a plate, then recurs on a vase. A cross-hatch is used to resemble a rug, then a fishnetted leg, then a fish.
This is by no means Nel’s first retrospective. As far back as 2001, an eponymous retrospective toured South Africa and, more recently, a survey called This plate is what I have to say was presented at Charleston House, Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant’s former residence in Lewes.
Retrospectives occasion… well, retrospection. All the fragments and frayed bits of the past suddenly seem to cohere. Life takes on a narrative arc. I visited Things Made Over Time many times and began to read it like a storybook. In it, three characters revealed themselves to me: The Reader, The Collector and The Gardener.
The Reader
“I read almost anything,” Nel once wrote. The library at his Calitzdorp home is diverse, encompassing books on art and interiors, fiction and poetry. More precious, however, are the texts that are peppered all over his plates, bowls and sculptures. Here’s Rumi, “The body itself is a screen to shield and partially reveal the light that’s blazing inside your presence,” framing a stretched, somewhat androgynous nude. There’s a fragment of a poem by Henry Vaughan and a quote from the erotic novel John Cleland wrote in debtors’ prison in 1748. I found this one the most perplexing: “I shall go into a hare with sorrow sigh and meikle care and I shall go in the devil’s name aye while I come home again.” As it turns out, these lines can be attributed to Isobel Gowdie, a Scottish woman who confessed to witchcraft in 1662. Nel says he loves this kind of “witch’s talk” and I do too. All of Nel’s texts feel that way, like witch’s talk, like crockery that’s come alive (à la La Belle et La Bête) to whisper spells, verse and lore.
This otherworldly quality can be partially attributed to the fact that Nel seldom cites. “If I use words on a plate I prefer not to declare the source,” he wrote, “not out of disrespect but because the naked words have their own power.” Rendered in Nel’s cheerful cursive script, these texts form a journal – a “mosaic of remarks,” as John Cage liked to call his own diary – notes and quotes scrawled down fast and loose in a moment of awe for a particular turn of phrase. “I just write down things that have to do with that day or that time,” he recently told Isaac Benigson, “they become quite a touching record of a fleeting time, which one otherwise might forget.”
As a writer, I cannot help but be drawn to them. They remind me so much of my own journals, which are full of myriad jottings-down (also in cursive): lines and lists, flirtations and fantasies, scraps of invention and extracts of inspiration that I don’t want to forget. If a potter is nothing without his tools – his brushes, his moulds, his kick-wheel – then a writer is nothing without her scribblings. They are the tools she uses to build the voice from which she writes. This is what Nel is able to convey so beautifully in his text works: the voice – or rather, the chorus of voices – from which he makes and writes.
The Collector
Anyone who has visited Nel will rave about his impressive collection of ceramic objects, from English Staffordshire and Chinese Imperial vases to Italian Majolica and Dutch Delftware. Perhaps unsurprisingly, he worked for many years as an antique dealer, first in England then, later, he owned a shop on Long Street in Cape Town called the Metal Snake. “It is thrilling to come across something good under a pile of rubble and decay and dust and dirt and squalor and to take it away and clean it and restore it to the living,” Nel wrote in a letter in 1968. In the Chinese tradition, we would call him a scholar’s collector: he learns from the pots he keeps. One plate mimics a willow pattern that was popular in the Qing dynasty. Another replicates the geometric graphics found in pottery from Ancient Greece.
Habitually, Nel kept some of his own pieces to be preserved in his personal archive. Some were too salacious for the markets of their time. Others were too beloved to be let go. Whatever the reason, the archive serves as a library of references and techniques to which Nel has returned over time. For example, a yellow-faced boy on a bowl, which served as the poster for the Charleston exhibition, inspired the newest series on show: seventeen plates each painted with variations of a scrappy dark-haired boy, some in worn t-shirts, many haloed by ferns.
Dior Men’s S/S 2025 show set, featuring blown up versions of Hylton Nel’s ceramics (Image credit: Photography by Adrien Dirand, courtesy of Dior).
Like Nel, Kim Jones, Dior Men’s Artistic Director, is an avid collector of ceramics, including many works by Hylton Nel as well as several pieces from the Bloomsbury Group’s Omega Workshops (including, much to my envy, Virginia Woolf’s teapot). “Like Hylton,” he wrote, “I am a magpie, an inadvertent collector.” It was this kinship that inspired Dior Men’s Spring/Summer 2025 collection, which premiered in Paris a week before the opening of Things Made Over Time. The collection, which was presented on a runway astride six gargantuan replicas of Nel’s cat sculptures to the tune of Kate Bush’s “Cloudbusting,” is inspired by workaday wear: saddlebags, aprons, clogs. More than the on-the-nose Nelisms – Dior for my real friends – I think this element fits snuggest to the Nel ethos. Famously, he likes pieces that can be used as well as displayed. “I am trying to get my ceramics to be like a part of life, a gesture, like sitting down on a chair or setting a table or frying an egg,” he once wrote. A vase may be able to “behave with dignity” on its own but it’s better if it’s “helping the flowers to do their thing.”
The Gardener
One plate on display, made in Bethulie in 1998, depicts St. Fiacre, the patron saint of gardening. Nel is an avid gardener, a habit he picked up from his Granny who, he remembers, beguiled him with the Latin names of the flowers she grew. His Calitzdorp home boasts a verdant array of such flowers, an unlikely oasis nestled in the heart of the semi-arid Klein Karoo. In this way, he reminds me of another artist-gardener, the late Derek Jarman, whose garden at Prospect Cottage has miraculously thrived despite four decades of periodic drought, gale-force winds and sea-salty shingle. Coincidentally, both artists were born a year apart, both were queer men trying to make do in conservative societies (I think of Nel’s chilling bowl which depicts the word GAY as an acronym for GOD ABHORS YOU) and, for both, their affection for gardening was equal to their love of books, antiques and art. But whereas Jarman’s artworks are morose and corrosive – replete with broken glass, splodges of tar and bloody crucifixes – Nel’s are a garden unto their own. His pots are replete with blooms – marigolds, foxgloves, pansies – and the colours that recur are distinctly botanical: freesia, chrysanthemum, overripe lime with a blood orange accent, clover, willow, gorse.
Then, of course, every good garden serves a double function as menagerie, supporting a myriad of animal life. “He doesn’t seek out animals,” Barben told me, “they find him.” Nel is a sort of Snow White. His letters and journals are full of visitations from lizards, snails, spiders, plenty of cats, of course, as well as every imaginable variety of bird. They pop up in his pottery too: lions and tigers and dragons (oh my!) not to mention the peacocks and ostriches and owls. “I have to see that many things have no importance and life is clear and trees matter, and sky and earth and people and creatures,” he wrote all the way back in 1966 as a student. This good-spiritedness and appreciation for life’s prosaic beauty have sustained six decades, amounting to various waves of success.
“I think that a late flowering could be better than an early one,” he told Michael Stevenson, “and any flowering better than none at all.” This was back in 2003. More than twenty years ago! Although Nel is in his 80s – and a lifelong smoking habit may have had an effect on his health – I wouldn’t be surprised if we were to be treated to yet another retrospective in twenty years’ time. There may be fewer ornaments, as his hands struggle to press complex moulds, but there will be plenty of plates and bowls adorned with his distinct eye for treasure. Hylton Nel’s bloom is perennial.