It happens in an instant.
She had picked up the plastic cup from the floor and, unthinking, in one motion, lent back and let it go, watching it hang in mid-air for a second, before seeing it tumble into what had looked like an empty sink. A sharp ring, followed by the mocking laughter of the cup bouncing off the stainless-steel basin, confirmed that the bowl hiding at the bottom of the sink was now broken, a semi-circular chunk, perhaps 2 x 4 inches across, struck clean from its side. My wife picks it up gingerly with the tips of her fingers, as if it were an insect, and a firmer grip would cause further injury. ‘I’m so sorry’ she says.
This was one of five sibling bowls we own by the French potter Jean-Nicolas Gérard, wide and shallow, with a flat belly and short, straight walls. Each has been pushed or pulled by their maker – perhaps by design, perhaps as a natural consequence of their conveyance by hand from wheel to board and, once dry, to be slipped and decorated – so that they appear like an imperfect circle with three rounded corners. An increment of decision-making – thicknesses, heights, depths – has contributed to an invisible, lopsided utility that is only really noticed when, as in this instance, something permanent and steadfast breaks and some poor stand-in, destined to inferiority, must take its place. A wide, unflaring base means these bowls do not tip. The meekest of corners and irregular walls help little hands clasp their sides, ensuring they do not turn with an over-zealous shovelling of cutlery and that they can be slotted on top of one another when no longer needed. Even the shallow height of each bowl allows my children, perched on oversized adult chairs, table top at shoulder height, to peer in and see their meal.
Jean-Nicolas’ pots are the workhorse of our kitchen. Plates, large and small; beakers, bowls, mugs, a breakfast cup in a design I have only managed to buy once and which I protect at all costs; large collared salad bowls and flat serving dishes. Most are now cracked or chipped. I have subjected them to a daily abuse, slipping their golden bodies below the washing suds where they pile higgledy-piggledy, glistening and warm, sliding amid their rough geometry. Their earthenware scars have been smoothed with loving use. I feel I know them intimately, by touch as much as anything.
So I have taken this pot and its broken heart as I sit, waiting to write about Jean-Nicolas’ work, turning the shard over in my hands and running my fingers over this gap, like a bite mark, where it once fit. Jean-Nicolas usually lets us see his clay, on unglazed feet, or scoured through a layer of slip. But with the delicate, dry crudity of this inner clay, it feels like I have laid a secret bare: an integrity that I had known and felt but never seen with its every day of use.
Put to servitude, these pots are handled, looked at, enjoyed every day. But they are probably contemplated – I mean really considered, carefully, detachedly, with time and perhaps even disaffection – very rarely. But here it is: a cross-section of dark, crumbly red that cannot be more than half a centimetre thick, the slip layer surrounding it scarcely a hair’s breadth. Within these tiny diameters, Jean-Nicolas Gérard produces magic and makes pots that I and others cannot help but use.
When he picks up his tool, Jean-Nicolas says, he knows what he is going to do with it: but I have heard him say that it is the blank page, more than a bad firing, that unsettles him most. ‘I’m not even sure it is ‘decoration’’ he says of his approach: ‘I think it’s just bringing a piece to life’ – ‘animation’ is the French term he uses – ‘Accentuating the volume…it’s something very natural. Bringing the pot to life.’
Now I have my own blank page in front of me. How will I bring life to it, and not simply decorate it?
Two years ago, my wife and I were tasked with translating and transcribing an interview with Gérard, conducted by Jay Goldmark over the summer at his studio in Valensole.
By a quirk of the way the footage was uploaded, each clip of film contained only the lower corner of the screen. Out of shot, Jean-Nicolas’ voice spoke in broad but cautious French, his loose hands occasionally glancing into frame. Sometimes we could see his fingers handling the collar on a vase, squeezing the clay into the ragged edge of the rim; other times, all activity was out of shot, out of sight.
Perhaps it is a trick of the strong Provencal light around the atelier that casts Jay’s film and photography in a Caravaggesque glory of light and dark, but Jean-Nicolas appears camera-shy, always retreating into the shadows and his work at the wheel, the bench, the basins of slip. More than that, he is reticent to talk about his process: what is happening in his head as his hands do their thing. Though thoughtful, intelligent, sensitive, Gérard never intellectualises: it is not so much an inability as a hesitancy to describe, to complicate a matter of intuition and feeling by making it pretentiously abstract, yet not wishing to diminish the attentive state of being and looking that is paramount in all that he does. The closest he comes is ‘l’intelligence des mains’: an ‘intelligence of the hands’. There is a ‘crafting’, bricolage element to his work that is not precious, and which allows those hands to stray from the wheel to the house he has built, the garden he cultivates, the food he cooks, the tokens and charms he has strewn about the workshop, dangling from the ceiling. ‘I don’t know how to say it, I like doing, I like making. Everything,’ he laughs. ‘Masonry, carpentry, pottery. I like planting, I like the garden. Making and planning a pleasant space to be in.’
The right words do not come easily. What is there to say, he seems to think: I do, I keep doing, I look, I keep looking. I step back, and let it happen – and sometimes, it all works out. He said the same thing in another interview of his early years, searching in the endless repetition of functional work for an individual voice: ‘Je tournais, je regardais, je détruisais, je recommençais’: ‘I would throw, I would look, I would destroy, I would start again.’
Jean-Nicolas does not remember having an early connection with clay. He was born in colonial Brazzaville, Congo, six years before decolonisation relocated the family to the hills north of Cannes and, a little later, Marseille. His father had worked for the French Geological Survey; the children would run barefoot over clay, over soil, through the hilltops and the woods. But there was no magical childhood affinity with his later medium. Like so many potters, he did not choose pottery but fell upon it, through a workshop in Marseille – ‘post-68, zen’, with a spirit of creative freedom. ‘Straight away I liked it – I could spend eight hours a day in that workshop.’ A second stroke of luck introduced him to the potter Jean Biagini, professor at the Ecole des Beaux Arts in Aix-en-Provence. Biagini had worked in Nepal, Cambodia, Japan, in Kyoto and Bizen and the US, producing work with a strong sculptural impression. ‘It was a big eye-opener for me – because I knew nothing about pottery. I sensed that clay was important for me, I had a good feeling about it, but I knew nothing at all. He was my guide: he gave me something that allowed me to go further. But it was luck. And I think that it’s true, that this is a material that suits me completely. I feel I am very much a man of the earth.’
What drew him to slipware was its holism: ‘One clay to make the pot, another clay for the slip, and copper, cobalt or iron for colour. And that was it.’ Within this self-contained tradition, expanse and change depend on recalibrating established parameters: to squeeze and flatten out, or to lengthen his collared vases, or to interrupt the making cycle, coiling where once he would have thrown on the wheel, combining separately produced constituents into new single pieces.
I suspect change is something that does not come easily to Jean-Nicolas’ work – or rather, that he is someone who finds themselves with more questions than answers about what he is doing. The white slipware that debuted at the Goldmark Gallery in the summer of 2020 was then already long in preparation, begun in earnest during a residency at the Archie Bray Foundation in the US. Around the time he was leaving, in fact, was the time I first corresponded with him, on the eve of his departure in January 2014.
I was to ask him about inspiration, the subject of a com-missioned article. Interestingly enough, the answer he gave in 2020 was almost exactly that he offered me six years ago; it might as well be a manifesto:
‘Of course I’m very influenced by Japanese ceramics, and there are also painters I like, such as Matisse, Bonnard. At the moment I am looking a lot at Chinese ink painting… I find that this is something that goes in and then later, when you least expect it, rushes back out again.
But what really influences me is to look very closely at what I am doing, and to especially look at the ‘accidents’ – when all of a sudden you do something… I think the most important thing is to pay close attention to what you are doing and to understand why it’s good, or not. That is when the work evolves – then you create, or you arrive at things or solutions that you had never expected.’
By a quirk of the way the footage was uploaded, each clip of film contained only the lower corner of the screen. Out of shot, Jean-Nicolas’ voice spoke in broad but cautious French, his loose hands occasionally glancing into frame. Sometimes we could see his fingers handling the collar on a vase, squeezing the clay into the ragged edge of the rim; other times, all activity was out of shot, out of sight.
Perhaps it is a trick of the strong Provencal light around the atelier that casts Jay’s film and photography in a Caravaggesque glory of light and dark, but Jean-Nicolas appears camera-shy, always retreating into the shadows and his work at the wheel, the bench, the basins of slip. More than that, he is reticent to talk about his process: what is happening in his head as his hands do their thing. Though thoughtful, intelligent, sensitive, Gérard never intellectualises: it is not so much an inability as a hesitancy to describe, to complicate a matter of intuition and feeling by making it pretentiously abstract, yet not wishing to diminish the attentive state of being and looking that is paramount in all that he does. The closest he comes is ‘l’intelligence des mains’: an ‘intelligence of the hands’. There is a ‘crafting’, bricolage element to his work that is not precious, and which allows those hands to stray from the wheel to the house he has built, the garden he cultivates, the food he cooks, the tokens and charms he has strewn about the workshop, dangling from the ceiling. ‘I don’t know how to say it, I like doing, I like making. Everything,’ he laughs. ‘Masonry, carpentry, pottery. I like planting, I like the garden. Making and planning a pleasant space to be in.’
The right words do not come easily. What is there to say, he seems to think: I do, I keep doing, I look, I keep looking. I step back, and let it happen – and sometimes, it all works out. He said the same thing in another interview of his early years, searching in the endless repetition of functional work for an individual voice: ‘Je tournais, je regardais, je détruisais, je recommençais’: ‘I would throw, I would look, I would destroy, I would start again.’
Jean-Nicolas does not remember having an early connection with clay. He was born in colonial Brazzaville, Congo, six years before decolonisation relocated the family to the hills north of Cannes and, a little later, Marseille. His father had worked for the French Geological Survey; the children would run barefoot over clay, over soil, through the hilltops and the woods. But there was no magical childhood affinity with his later medium. Like so many potters, he did not choose pottery but fell upon it, through a workshop in Marseille – ‘post-68, zen’, with a spirit of creative freedom. ‘Straight away I liked it – I could spend eight hours a day in that workshop.’ A second stroke of luck introduced him to the potter Jean Biagini, professor at the Ecole des Beaux Arts in Aix-en-Provence. Biagini had worked in Nepal, Cambodia, Japan, in Kyoto and Bizen and the US, producing work with a strong sculptural impression. ‘It was a big eye-opener for me – because I knew nothing about pottery. I sensed that clay was important for me, I had a good feeling about it, but I knew nothing at all. He was my guide: he gave me something that allowed me to go further. But it was luck. And I think that it’s true, that this is a material that suits me completely. I feel I am very much a man of the earth.’
What drew him to slipware was its holism: ‘One clay to make the pot, another clay for the slip, and copper, cobalt or iron for colour. And that was it.’ Within this self-contained tradition, expanse and change depend on recalibrating established parameters: to squeeze and flatten out, or to lengthen his collared vases, or to interrupt the making cycle, coiling where once he would have thrown on the wheel, combining separately produced constituents into new single pieces.
I suspect change is something that does not come easily to Jean-Nicolas’ work – or rather, that he is someone who finds themselves with more questions than answers about what he is doing. The white slipware that debuted at the Goldmark Gallery in the summer of 2020 was then already long in preparation, begun in earnest during a residency at the Archie Bray Foundation in the US. Around the time he was leaving, in fact, was the time I first corresponded with him, on the eve of his departure in January 2014.
I was to ask him about inspiration, the subject of a com-missioned article. Interestingly enough, the answer he gave in 2020 was almost exactly that he offered me six years ago; it might as well be a manifesto:
‘Of course I’m very influenced by Japanese ceramics, and there are also painters I like, such as Matisse, Bonnard. At the moment I am looking a lot at Chinese ink painting… I find that this is something that goes in and then later, when you least expect it, rushes back out again.
But what really influences me is to look very closely at what I am doing, and to especially look at the ‘accidents’ – when all of a sudden you do something… I think the most important thing is to pay close attention to what you are doing and to understand why it’s good, or not. That is when the work evolves – then you create, or you arrive at things or solutions that you had never expected.’
‘Beauty,’ Baudelaire wrote in 1855, ‘always has an element of strangeness…of simple, unintended, unconscious strangeness, and this form of strangeness is what gives it the right
to be called beauty.’
This beautiful strangeness, Baudelaire tells us – ‘necessary, incompressible, infinitely varied, dependent upon environment, climate, habits, upon race, religion and the temperament of the artist’ – you cannot correct, control, or amend by some set of arbitrary, ‘Utopian’ rules; it cannot be designed, plotted, planned without killing the very essence of art itself. ‘This element of strangeness which constitutes and defines individuality, without which there is no beauty’, he continues, is like taste: put aside function, put aside nutritional value, and foods differ ‘only by the idea they reveal to the tongue.’
Jean-Nicolas’ pots are strangely beautiful. They do not possess the kind of utilitarian beauty Ralph Waldo Emerson suggested one could find in the perfect structure of the cells of a bee’s hive, or the exquisite efficiency in the bones or quills of a bird: a beauty so perfect and replicable that it is woven into the organic fabric of life. Nor are they purposeful, in that engineered sense of the perfect teapot uniting physical laws and mathematical ratios to provide the perfect pour to a cup of tea. The countless people who buy Jean-Nicolas’ pots – many of them renowned potters themselves – are not doing so because of some peculiar utility that only they provide (though, like my broken bowl, with use we often find one).
My mother taught me by her hospitality that the most beautiful thing you can do for another person is to feed them. Not just satiate, gratify, fulfil a need, though there is great virtue in that too; but to give something of yourself in the meal you offer. Taste is cultural, taste is geographical: but to make a gift of food, and of one’s company and one’s humanity – well, this is universal. And there is a little strangeness to it too – something ‘necessary, incompressible, and infinitely varied’ in the communion people share over food freely given and willingly taken.
The utility of Jean-Nicolas’ work, of which we speak so much in the sphere of studio pottery, is not an imposing one. It does not dictate its function, nor do its dimensions force the hand. Instead, there is a total, giving openness to his pots – a ‘take me as I am’ attitude that is so very easy to ascribe to ceramics, dumb and inanimate as they are in one’s palm, but that is supremely rare: and he achieves it in work that is expressive, lively, infectiously energetic and yet so warm in touch. They have a beauty not of utility or deign, but of reciprocity.
Jean-Nicolas’ pots do not satiate, gratify, fill a need: they feed, not in the platitudinous sense ‘feeding the soul’ but of giving himself up in every bit of clay that he touches and every piece that he makes. He has no words for what he does because he has shared it all, in the communication that is a potter’s way of life: serving, again, and again, and again, in endless work a beautiful strangeness costing not less than everything.
Max Waterhouse, Summer 2022