Australian musician Nick Cave is a famous singer and songwriter who fronts the Bad Seeds. He is one of our best known and most prolific Australians with a wealth of creativity behind him as he nears 70 years old. Today, he is sharing something new with the world – his visual art!
Cave has chosen to work with ceramics and makes his international debut with a collection of sculptures inspired by Staffordshire flat-back pottery figures. This kind of pottery emerged in England around the 18th century Victorian period but kept momentum as it was a popular decorative ‘mantlepiece’ medium with a knack for story-telling, often tales of heroes and villains or fictional characters from literature.
Cave’s version is deeply personal work which is a product of self-reflection. Cave reconciles what it is to be human; loving, flawed, confronted with grief and more.
The figures were first shown in a commercial space Xavier Hufkens in Brussels and are now on view in Cave’s first solo institutional presentation at Museum Voorlinden in Wassenaar, Netherlands. All the works in the show ‘The Devil – A Life’ have been acquired for the museum collection. The body of work tells the story of the Devil through a series of 17 hand painted sculptures which as Voorlinden notes take us on a journey ‘from innocence through experience into confrontation of our mortality.’
Director Suzanne Swarts said ‘Staffordshire flatbacks are traditionally mass-produced figurines made for the mantelpiece. In Nick Cave’s hands, however, they become art. This deeply personal series of sculptures shows, in powerful colours and compositions, the story of the devil as an everyday man, shaped by triumph, grief and remorse.’
Cave’s musical oeuvre is comprised of songs with meaningful narrative, characters and reference to the Old Testament, Greek mythology and the American South. So you might assume his music influenced today’s art, but actually the love of a poetic narrative was always there. As he told the Art Newspaper, visual art came naturally to him as a child (born in Warracknabeal in Victoria 1957). At age 4 he crafted figures out of clay, then in his early 20s attended but didn’t fully commit to art school, he left in 1976 to focus on music. Even with a successful music career, the interest in visual art remained an undercurrent and Cave would collect Staffordshire figures from op-shops.
When the Covid-19 pandemic began he found himself at home with the inspiration to make his own figures through which he could continue his storytelling in another way, and also perhaps process some complex feelings and experiences. The artist has said the figures are not meant to be kitsch or ironic, rather they are sincere artworks that hark back to the ‘unfinished business’ of both his initial interest in art but more seriously are an opportunity to grieve and meditate on the history of his own life, for example the loss of his son.
Cave said to editor and curator, José da Silva, ‘Art for me is a way, in songwriting, of being able to articulate the terms of my life in a way that I literally have no idea [how to] outside of art. I don’t know what’s going on.’
The museum elaborated;
The Devil — A Life is a visual narrative that explores the complexities of the human condition. Rather than depicting a fearsome Antichrist, Cave portrays the Devil as a flawed, relatable figure, illustrating the blend of good and bad inherent in everyone. Through his experience of the vicissitudes of life in a very human way, he becomes a symbol of humanity’s darker, irrational sides, while also embodying our shared desire to be and do better. The story’s trajectory is inspired by the Stations of the Cross, a series of fourteen images depicting Jesus Christ on the day of his crucifixion. In his series, Cave shows how the Devil evolves with the passage of time, accompanied by symbolic figurines like a blood-red monkey and red, black and white horses —the colours of the three steeds ridden by the horsemen of the Apocalypse from the Book of Revelation.
In lieu of a formal catalogue listing the works on display or explaining their meaning, Cave has produced a short story which has been published on board, like a children’s book.