I first found myself on the Goldmark website some years ago in search of prints from David Hockney’s Grimm’s Fairy Tale series. I had little or no interest in ceramics at the time. My favourite mug was a gift from Thamesmead Prison where I’d done a workshop, printed with an aerial view of the prison and the legend ‘HMP Thamesmead – Wish You Were Here’. My favourite plate was a standard store-bought item with a white centre and a custard yellow border from which I ate toast and Alphabetti Spaghetti as a child in the 1960s and which has miraculously survived for nearly 60 years. Most ceramics, for me, fell into the uncomfortable void between utensils and art objects. Perhaps I was too much of a literalist, but to buy a beautiful bowl, vase or platter intending only to look at it seemed a kind of pretence, dishonest almost.
Then, to my surprise, I saw photographs of Jean-Nicolas Gérard’s work and fell in love.
One, it’s made to be used. It looks that way and it feels that way. I drink my first cup of tea every day from one of his beakers and eat my muesli from one of his bowls. If you come round for lunch we’ll probably be using his plates. And that’s exactly what Jean-Nicolas Gérard intends. Watch the Goldmark video interview with him at his studio in Provence and look at the lunch he lays out in the garden – tomato salad, cheese, bread and aubergine caviar all presented on his plates and platters. They look beautiful doing nothing, but they look best when they’re doing what they were made to do.
Two, it’s loose and rough and spontaneous. Having said which, it’s tempting to add, ‘but this belies a hidden sophistication’ or some such qualification. But you wouldn’t make a similar defence of a painting by Jean-Michel Basquiat or a sculpture by Phyllida Barlow. Hidden sophistication be damned; looseness, roughness and spontaneity are qualities to be celebrated in and of them-selves when lines and shapes seem to flow from an artist’s hands with this kind of joyous rightness.
Three, it’s utterly transparent. Everything involved in its making is visible in the finished object – the turning, cutting, bending and moulding of the clay, the fingerprints, the splotches of an old paint brush, the scratches made in the coloured slip with a burin or a stick. Nothing is hidden. It’s like watching a magician show you the secret to their trick then doing it all over again and the trick being just as magical as it was the first time.
Four, it’s gloriously analogue. I know it’s the wrong antithesis to apply to pottery, but the digital nature of the modern world means that everywhere we are drowning in smoothness, so that I’ve come, more and more, to appreciate impasto, smudges, thumbprints, brush marks, anything that says, ‘This was made by a human being’. The double pleasure of holding work by Jean-Nicolas is that you often find your own hand settling into dints and troughs made by his as they shaped the clay or patterned the slip. Indeed, most of the drinking vessels he makes are slightly compressed on either side by his thumb and middle finger so that they fit perfectly into your hand and you find yourself holding them just as he held them.
Five, it’s joyous. If we are beset by an excess of smoothness in the wider world then we’re beset by an excess of coolness in the world of contemporary art. There is a widespread embarrassment about big, positive emotions, as if they are naïve and childish. Far better to hide behind the ironic, the arch, the wry, the pretence of disaffection. In contrast to this way of thinking, Jean-Nicolas Gérard’s work throws its arms wide and feels no embarrassment whatsoever. It is an unrestrained celebration of clay and colour, of shape and form and volume, of sitting down together round a table and eating and drinking.
There is an oft-repeated maxim that Jean-Nicolas Gérard is ‘the potter’s potter’. I think this does him a disservice. It suggests something narrow and arcane about his work which can properly be understood only by other practitioners who share some kind of specialised knowledge. On the contrary, I doubt there is another potter out there whose work is more easily understood and more eager to be used.
Mark Haddon is a writer and an artist. His bestselling novel, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time won numerous literary prizes, including the Whitbread Award. His latest book, Dogs and Monsters, was published in August of this year.
