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Nick Cave is really serious about his ceramic art. In the meantime, even so much that it can use it to exhibit his own series for a long time. In a new interview, he revealed why he is so much.
Everything because of the covid
The hobby probably took its course during the Covid 19 pandemic when Cave started to make ceramic sculptures in the Staffordshire style. In this way, as he told “The Art Newspaper” in an interview, he was able to further develop his passion for characters from the Victorian age into an artistic hobby. He saw the characters in his own house and thought: I can do that too.
First ceramic exhibition
In 2022 he already presented a 17-part series entitled “The Devil-A Life”, which is currently being presented in the Museum Voorlinden in the Dutch city of Wassenaar. The series represents a central figure, such as the devil, who takes a bride, wages a war, sacrifices a child, feels remorse. Finally the child forgives him.
The 67-year-old not only made the series for fun at the craft, but also said that he also processed part of his grief after the death of his son Arthur in 2015. At the end of the series, according to Cave, it was about guilt and forgiveness in connection with the death of his child. “It was something that I could never fully achieve in my songwriting,” said the Australian in an interview with “The Art Newspaper”.
It is not the first time that Cave is artistically active apart from the music. In the same interview, he said that his work as a ceramist was “a kind of longing to return to a kind of visual art that I had given up in my early 20s when I studied at the art school”. He probably had experimented with ceramics in his childhood. His mother had valued the works until her death. Therefore, the manual work also has a very sentimental touch and nothing to do with irony.