​Contemporary South African Art

Article credits to: http://finearts.co.za/old/artists/nel.htm

​

Born: Zambia

Hylton Nel is a potter, painter and sculptor: a maker of earthen pots and plates and figures built and glazed and painted with a wilful but engaging oddness.

 

His home is in the Karoo, yet the work that he makes there seems to come from a different time and place.

 

There is an other-worldliness about it that suggests a kinship with English pots and ancient Chinese ones, with Staffordshire figures and jade animals, but Nel’s latter day variants are always made in a manner that is uniquely his own. “I take both east and west as by cultural heritage” he has said “I work as best I can with the past for inspiration” and the past is rich fuel for a rattle bag imagination in which anything and everything (people, places, books, especially books) are hoarded as a potential source. The end result is a sideways view of the world - sometimes funny, sometimes a little sad - an irreverent but intuitive combination of eccentricity and something deeply felt.

 

Nel’s imagination is probably at its loosest in the making of his simplest works - the unchanging form of moulded plates allowing a total freedom to roam in the painted decoration. Technically they have a clumsiness, deliberately so, which adds to the quirkiness and always at the base of what he does there’s a simple delight in colour and in the depth and richness of his glazes.

 

They are wonderful things to use and collectors of his work often develop a sentimental daftness about the everyday objects, as if they had acquired a fondness out of all proportion to their function, almost as if they had collected a little bit of the man. This isn’t as silly as it sounds for

 

Nel puts himself into his work along with everything else. He is one of the most personal and peculiar and original potters at work anywhere in the world today.

 

Nel was born in Zambia, but grew up in the Northern Cape in South Africa. He remembers (and let it not be forgotten that Nel’s prodigious memory is vital to his creativity) making clay figures as a child and begging his mother to buy him the porcelain Potter and Moore lavender-sellers, displayed with provincial pomp in the window of the local chemist shop.

 

After a fine arts degree at Rhodes University, he studied ceramics at the Royal College of Art in Antwerp, and eventually returned to South Africa where he taught ceramics, ceramic history and drawing at the Port Elizabeth Technikon, Michaelis School of Fine Art, University of Cape Town and the Art School of Stellenbosch University.

 

Nel moved to Bethulie in the Southern Free State in 1991 and then to Calitzdorp in the Klein Karoo during 2002. He exhibits regularly at the Fine Art Society, New Bond Street, London and Ingleby Gallery, Carlton Terrace, Edinburgh. There was a retrospective exhibition at the King George VI Art Gallery in Port Elizabeth in mid 2001.