Hylton Nel is a master artist-potter. He is a maker of plates, bowls, vessels, figurines and often cats. He was born in Zambia in 1941 and brought up on a farm in the Northern Cape in South Africa. He studied painting and art history at Rhodes University, South Africa, and ceramics at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp, Belgium. In the early 1970s Nel lived in England, mostly at Whitstable in Kent, and exhibited with what was then the Crafts Centre of Great Britain. When he returned to South Africa he taught at art schools in Port Elizabeth and Cape Town, all the time working with clay. In 1991, he abandoned city life and since then has lived and worked in small towns, first Bethulie and now Calitzdorp. Since the middle of the 1990s he has exhibited extensively in South Africa and England, which culminated in a retrospective exhibition entitled: This Plate is What I Have to Say at Charleston, the Sussex-based house museum dedicated to the Bloomsbury Group.

Venus and Sebastian is an exhibition of old and new work, and takes its name from an exhibition held at Hylton’s home-studio in Port Elizabeth in 1983. At its centre were two earthenware figurines: one of Venus, goddess of love, beauty and desire, and another of Sebastian, Saint Sebastian, the patron saint of archers, pin-makers and athletes – and a symbol of homosexuality and male desire. The pair were made to commemorate the wedding of two of Hylton’s dear friends, and I am very pleased they are included in the current exhibition, alongside a pair of homoerotic and feline-themed reverse glass paintings from the same collection.

Through his deft skill and irreverent wit, he paints images of his world through ceramics – often making pointed and poignant references to ideas and stories that surround him. Unfolding ideas play out in sets of plates or bowls, and mottos or suggestive phrases are curled in his distinctive elegant script. His visual language is populated with images and ideas relating to the history of decorative arts, literature, political concerns or his delineation of gay life. With an extensive knowledge of global pottery traditions, and deep regard for the importance of objects, his forms and glazes pay homage to Chinese ceramics, majolica wares or English Victorian Staffordshire. When surveying his artworks the glazes sing in mulberry, celadon, pistachio or spinach, dusky rose or ancient coppery blue.

Art historically informed yet effortless, wayward and idiosyncratic, Hylton has a unique and extraordinary aesthetic vision. In a statement by Hylton about his work, first published in 1996 by The Fine Art Society in London and reprinted in 2001 in the catalogue of his retrospective exhibition at the King George VI Art Gallery in Port Elizabeth he notes:

I take both East and West as my cultural heritage. I work as best I can with the past for inspiration. I dreamed the other night of the edge of a bowl. I saw a welt of turquoise coloured glaze with a crackle. … I keep shelves filled with glazed pottery of many colours. These are all old things. Between them and me there is a dialogue.

It is with enormous pleasure that Old and Interesting Art hosts a solo exhibition of Hylton Nel, an artist that wholly speaks to the programme’s focus on artists who have a radical vision.