A year after Hylton Nel’s move across town into a smaller home at the base of rock-strewn hillock outside Calitzdorp, a farming settlement in South Africa’s semi-arid Little Karoo, the artist-potter is still unpacking boxes filled with his ‘stuff’. Nel, who is currently showing 200 recent examples of his delightfully guileless clay plates at Charleston, the Sussex-based house museum of Bloomsbury group painters Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant, is an inveterate collector of things. Although he prefers the word ‘stuff’. Nel uses the word a lot in conversation, and doesn’t discriminate about what it encompasses.
‘I don’t have much of my stuff around, but I do have some on top of the shelves because it would be ridiculous to not have anything,’ says the Zambian-born South African who has lived in Calitzdorp since 2002. Nel is seated in the living room of his gently retrofitted 19th-century cottage. He gestures to a vase near a clay votive figure from Benin atop one of his many bookshelves. Its distinctive green glaze is an opportunity to extemporise – passionately and casually, as is his manner – on a favourite subject: Chinese ceramics. ‘For a long time, the Chinese were the only ones who could make green porcelain,’ Nel begins, his gravelly Anglo-Afrikaans accent a product of his country upbringing and Hockney-like commitment to smoking.
At 82, Nel remains sprightly and curious, but is particularly chipper following his spring visit to England for his show at Charleston. Rather than rehearse the details of his exhibition, a career highlight after 34 years of under-the-radar exhibiting in London, he prefers to speak about friends and collectors. They include Moira Benigson, an early champion of Nel’s who was instrumental in arranging his big exhibition at the old Fine Art Society address on New Bond Street in 1996, and also fashion designer Kim Jones. ‘He’s got quite a bit of my work, the vases and rude plates,’ says Nel, chuckling at his choice of adjective.
Jones, who is artistic director of luxury brands Fendi and Dior Men, owns two homes, both furnished with works by Nel. In Sussex, the bedroom of his 18th-century rectory includes a cat vase and Staffordshire-influenced mother-and-child cat sculpture, both by Nel, on a mantelpiece next to a Duncan Grant painting. Nel recently visited Jones at his sleek steel-and-glass home in west London designed by the Italian architect Gianni Botsford. ‘I was exhausted by the travel, but I found Kim’s place so startling.’ The designer’s library especially was a tonic. ‘Kim has a Little Red Book signed by Mao Zedong. There are all kinds of treasures. It was magnificent.’
Nel’s approach to decoration is distilled in this anecdote. Books are a marker of style, and appear everywhere in his cottage: in the living room, along two walls, on a shelf near his double bed, as well as in two rooms that function as a library. In his telling, Nel’s home is still a work in progress; however, the library was unpacked soon after the boxes arrived. Built up over many decades, Nel’s extensive collection includes books devoted to house interiors, gardens, flowers, painting and ceramics.
‘There are a lot I haven’t read, which is fantastic as I can discover things, sometimes only years later,’ he says of his collection. ‘I’m just glad they are waiting there, on my shelf.’ About the Tom of Finland book near his bed, he smiles and simply offers, ‘Why not?’ Nel reads fiction, too. A garrulous conversationalist, between talk of a street in central Johannesburg named for his great-grandfather, shunga erotic prints from Japan, Gustave Courbet’s anti-erotic painting The Origin of the World (1866) and contemporary country manners in Norfolk, he expresses great pleasure in Cao Xueqin’s mid-18th-century autobiographical novel Dream of the Red Chamber. ‘It is about totally earthy, real things, mixed with mythology,’ he says. The same holds of Nel’s personal output of plates featuring pithy epithets from favourite books, gambolling figures and – not infrequently – male nudes.
One of his main book suppliers is Henrietta Dax of Clarke’s Bookshop, a Cape Town institution. The two are old friends. In 2000, they travelled with Nel’s late partner, Bernard Wilke, to Mozambique. Nel excavated examples of Portuguese stencil tiles from a rubble site. The tiles are mounted in a plaster-of-Paris frame that hangs in his studio. There are other such displays of hand-painted tiles from 18th-century Holland. The tiles, like much of the ceramics and earthenware on display, are for looking at – an engaged looking that isn’t only focused on the aesthetic quality of these objects.
Installed in the living room is a heavy, rectangular table that partially serves as a room divider. It has a changing display of archaeological artefacts, sculpture and pottery, including a large brown-glazed stoneware martaban. The ensemble functions like an object atlas, a map of Nel’s interest in English, Dutch, Spanish, Persian and Chinese ceramic traditions. Nel picks up a stoppered ceramic flask that earlier in the day he retrieved from a box, and walks outdoors with it.
His garden is a work in progress. He planted hollyhocks and cut down some olive trees to liberate the sky, an intervention that also exposed an African walnut tree, which in spring has bright red blooms. The copper-red glaze of the object in his hand shimmers in the sharp winter light. The flask, he informs me, was modelled after a leather container used by itinerant Mongolian horsemen and was later produced in ceramic. Nel acquired it from a Chinese dealer specialising in objects from Xinjiang, in China’s northwest, during one of his two visits to the country. In addition to making ceramics and teaching at various art schools in his thirties and forties, Nel also traded in antiquities for a period.
‘My passionate interest in China has diminished somewhat,’ he concedes, even as the shelves in his library suggest otherwise. ‘I don’t feel so avidly interested in Chinese stuff anymore.’ He nips back inside and shifts his attention to an Egyptian limestone sculpture dating from the Ptolemaic period. The snake-like figure, which sports a bearded Grecian face, was acquired at auction sometime in the 1970s. In the manner of many of the objects filling his crowded home, he has looked at it for a long time. There is romance and succour in Nel’s fascination with the material world. It replenishes him.
Hylton Nel: This plate is what I have to say, Charleston, 25 March–10 September. Details: charleston.org.uk
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