Things made over time

Making safety

Audio by Jules Keohane

A gallery in Cape Town is currently hosting a mini-retrospective of the work of the well-known South African artist-potter Hylton Nel. It is called ‘Things made over time’.

‘The body itself is a screen to shield and partially reveal the light that’s blazing inside your presence’ are words painted on to this platter. PICTURE: Karin Schimke

The title of the exhibition sums up, perhaps, why it is such a moving exhibition:

• Things (sculptures and vessels, mostly bowls)

• Made (by the hands of a human using tools)

• Over time (he was born in 1941, the exhibited work starts in the 1960s and ends in 2024).

Floor-to-ceiling photographs of Hylton Nel reading on a bed greet you at the exhibition's beginning.

His previous exhibition, in 2023, was called ‘This plate is what I have to say’. He does not have an Instagram account in which he says what he stands for. He lets his work speak.

Nel makes a lot of plates and bowls (‘a lot’ is understatement) and he uses this repetition to calibrate infinite variety and experimentation, and like many artists and writers, he has recurring themes.

'Standing between trees is very nice for boys' and 'Praying in the bush is beautiful for boys'. PICTURES: Karin Schimke

Cats and penises and politics are the three most obvious ones here, each signalling a way of being in the world: the domestic and species-relational; the intimate, both sexual and psychic; and the connectedness of everything by the intractable threads of politics.

A plate dated from 2014 is called 'Three unforgettable weeks in Gaza'. Underneath the title of the plate, in black block letters, is a list of what must have been news items at the time of the visit in Gaza (it's not clear from the work itself whether Nel was in Gaza himself or is reporting something he heard.) Another plate, in another room, which means it was from a different era, has the Star of David and the Palestian flag painted on it. PICTURES: Karin Schimke

One of Nel’s plates is called ‘Three unforgettable weeks in Gaza’, and under the black letters of that title, is what must be a report of things that happened during those three weeks:

14.7.14 The Costa Concordia has been refloated. Germany has taken home the Fifa soccer cup. The 200+ Nigerian school girls are still missing. Hamas sends streams of rockets into Israel. Israel responds with deadly fire and the people of Gaza are still in their open jail. 170+ killed so far. Houses turned to rubble. This is the way the world has always been.

My son WhatsApped me while I was writing this and wanted to know why I was struggling to write about the Hylton Nel exhibition. One of the reasons, no doubt, is because I am not an artist or a critic and I don’t have the language nor the qualifications to speak with any authority on what I saw.

But the other reason – a more valid one, because art itself allows us all to have a response – is because I was so moved by it and I want to say that without saying ‘I was so moved’. But I didn’t know how to do that.

‘I am so moved by people who live a creative life and who work and produce many things, and are not afraid of mistakes, and who engage with their work viscerally and intellectually,’ I wrote to Ollie.

‘I am also so moved by people who see themselves connected to the complexity of the world and don’t ignore politics, but nor do they make politics the only focus of all they make. They make space for beauty, and for fun and laughter, and for irony.’

I like it when people look at suffering directly and bear it, knowing that it could come to them. That their houses could burn, their water could be poisoned, their children killed, and they flinch and feel, instead of laagering and shoring up all the pity and pain for themselves, and annihilating the other in a frenzy of self-protection.

Rebecca Solnit, in The Faraway Nearby, wrote ‘There are people whose response to the suffering of others is to become upset and demand consolation themselves.’

Hylton Nel is GAY.

There is no self-pity in Nel’s work, and there are no easy conclusions or pat moralisations. Nothing is too small or too big to talk about.

And though his work does not make him safe in the world – no one is safe – I see it as a form of shelter.

To see how someone has spent a long and productive life making instead of destroying – and making against the instinct for the delusion of perfection – is to witness an expansive example of what I think it means to live a worthy life.

‘On the North side of Bethulie, lives a breeding pair of black eagles Verreaux’s eagles.’

Creative work keeps you out of mischief. It provides a channel for processing difficulty, and reasonable means for creating joy, because to make things is to lose yourself, and to transcend the bitterness of the world for a while.

Make things. Make time to make things. Make a life of making.

This is what I took away from Hylton Nel’s exhibition ‘Things made over time’.

• If you can’t get to the Stevenson gallery in Cape Town to see the exhibition, then set aside some time to look through the archives on the Hylton Nel website.

• Other (younger) South African ceramicists whose work I admire are Zizipho Poswa, Ben Orkin and Lungiswa Joe.

Until next week.

Karin