Hylton Nel, Charleston — pioneer potter who still crosses boundaries

Some 20 years ago, in the days when the Fine Art Society, the grandest of Bond Street dealers, still had palatial and rambling premises nearly opposite Sotheby’s, I came across an odd but very distinctive plate inscribed in wobbly writing: “though the church cannot bless it has always buggered”.

The plate, by the South African master potter Hylton Nel, had a mood of archaeological rediscovery, as if it was from the late 17th century but creatively reinvented, using old ceramic forms in a way more playful than purely historical. Its cryptic, anticlerical inscription shows how it is possible to treat modern artefacts as part of a creative continuum instead of just sterile works of art.

In 2007, I chose Hylton’s work for the Discerning Eye exhibition at the Mall Galleries. Nel’s pots occupy that curious territory between craft and fine art that used not to be clearly defined, a kind of border country. In recent years that territory has expanded, thanks partly to the recognition by British ceramicist Grayson Perry that he could use the medium of ceramics as a fine-art vocabulary — full of irony, complex folk narratives and political meaning.

Nel, now 82, describes himself as an “artist-potter”, and this rightly conveys the sense that he is both: artisan and conceptual artist. In March, partly due to the interest of Kim Jones, creative director of Dior Homme and Fendi, the gallery at Charleston farmhouse in East Sussex opened an exhibition of Nel’s plates, arranged historically, entitled This Plate is What I have to Say.

Nel was brought up in an Afrikaner family on a farm in the Northern Cape of South Africa. At Rhodes University in Grahamstown in the early 1960s, he started experimenting with pottery in an independent-minded and imaginative way, making pots that subverted the more conservative, Japanese-inspired tradition of Bernard Leach, then dominant in art schools in South Africa as in Britain. It was a way of rebelling against his father, who wanted him to be a doctor. He was greatly influenced by his discovery of Greek terracotta figures and T’ang horses in a cupboard at the art school. He took one of the T’ang horses out to enjoy overnight.

Like a lot of young South Africans, Nel left South Africa after university but, instead of going to England where he thought he would just meet other South Africans, or the Netherlands, which was too redolent of his parents’ Calvinism, he went to the Fine Arts Academy in Antwerp. Here, he switched from painting to ceramics, in which he says he found a much freer form of expression by producing inventive, often politically and psychologically subversive, imagery.

He was able to travel, discovering Greece and visiting Flemish Baroque churches. His style of free, anarchic small figurines was already established by the time he left Antwerp for England, where he lived in Richmond, selling pots to the British Crafts Centre in Covent Garden. For a while, he owned an antique shop in Whitstable, having a good eye for objects and furniture.

In 1974, Nel went back to South Africa where he has lived ever since, originally teaching, first in Port Elizabeth, moving to Cape Town in 1987. In 1991, he gave up teaching to move to the country and focus full-time on his pottery. In 2002, he and his partner, Bernard Wilke, moved again into the Karoo — bleak, open country north-east of Cape Town — where they created a rural paradise with peacocks and cats, a large garden, a big messy pottery painted putty pink in a corrugated iron outhouse and rooms full of miscellaneous objects and ornaments picked up at antique fairs.

Since then, he has created an astonishing range of pots, plates, jars, vases, ceramic figures and small statuettes, all decorated in his distinctive style, which is a kind of freely expressive vernacular, often featuring an erect penis. He doesn’t care for conventional good taste and instead employs imagery as if drawn for children’s books, almost always with inscriptions in his childishly cursive hand which are often cryptically suggestive, written in English and Afrikaans.

The decorations on the pots in the exhibition commemorate cats and friends, as well as the election of Barack Obama. They are a kind of visual autobiography, each one dated. Nel first sold his work in England at an exhibition in Christopher Farr’s carpet shop in Primrose Hill, north London, in the late 1980s where it was seen and admired by Min Hogg, the doyenne of World of Interiors. He had his first exhibition at the Fine Art Society in 1996.

Until now, his work has been a small-scale cult, known mainly to private collectors who admire the ambiguity of its status. The exhibition at Charleston shows how Hylton absorbs ideas from his own collecting — the moment he began to date his work in 1986, and the beginning of his mock-humorous use of the penis as a decorative motif; two penises greeting one another from a plate from the mid-1980s; and a pink penis with the inscription “Hic habitat felicitas” (“Here lives happiness”).

With this exhibition the obvious analogies are, first, with the ceramics of Quentin Bell, the son of Clive and Vanessa Bell, who took himself off to train as a potter in Stoke-on-Trent in the late 1930s, partly as a form of rebellion against his father’s interest in French and Italian art. Bell had a kiln at Charleston late in life where he produced similarly playful and eclectic figure studies. The other comparable figure is Perry.

But Nel seems more of a one-off: vigorously independent, a bit anarchic in temperament, charming and shy, travelling widely through the history of ceramics in a freely experimental way, adapting techniques from history, never taking himself too seriously and concentrating on private jokes — images of the arcane, and with a powerful belief in sexual freedom. It’s an exciting exhibition of a potter whose work deserves to be better known.

To September 10, charleston.org.uk

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