Nick Cave says he has a passion for Staffordshire-style ceramics which helped him come to terms with his son’s death
Nick Cave has opened up about his passion for Staffordshire-style ceramic sculptures.
The Bad Seeds frontman previously unveiled a 17-piece series titled The Devil - A Life at a Finnish art gallery 2022. It has since been put on on display at the Museum Voorlinden in Wassenaar, Netherlands.
In a new interview with The Art Newspaper, Cave said: “I’ve collected Staffordshire-style sculptures for years. I just love these things. They’re not expensive works of art; you find them in second-hand shops. I just had them in front of me as I was just sitting at my desk.”
He continued: “We sort of grew idle through Covid [and] were allowed to do things that we normally wouldn’t have done. I sat there looking at one of these Staffordshires just thinking, ‘I can do this.’”
According to Cave, his mother had loved the clay figurines he made as a teenager, and her passing during the Covid pandemic left him with a “sentimental tug” that soon evolved into his latest passion. “Mostly it was just that I thought, ‘Fuck, you know, it can’t be that hard to make one of these things,’” he explained.
He went on to explain that the series also served as a way for him to come to terms with the death of his son Arthur in 2015.
Cave said: “The whole thing started to have a more mysterious, mystical pull. Then they started to be in order, one after the other. They were trying to make sense of my predicament in a way that I couldn’t make sense of it in my songs, for some reason.
“Ultimately, this ended up being something about culpability and forgiveness around the death of my son. That was something that I could never quite get to in my songwriting. To me, these became acutely personal.”
Elsewhere, Cave recently shared details of a European solo tour set to kick off later this summer. You can see the full list of dates here and purchase any remaining tickets here.
He also contributed to the ‘Los Angeles Rising’ wildfire relief benefit compilation album alongside PJ Harvey, Devo, Gary Numan, Primal Scream and more.
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Damian Jones
NME
