The Chicago-based artist Theaster Gates is impossible to categorise – his work shifts seamlessly between ceramics, urban planning, music and construction, often combining all these elements at once. Whether restoring buildings in his home town in neighbourhoods blighted by underinvestment, performing with his band The Black Monks, or shaping clay into monumental vessels – such as Voulkos #1, made of bisque-fired stoneware with paint – his work is imbued with spirituality and critique, underpinned by a sense of pragmatism. We met him at his Serpentine Pavilion in London in 2022.
Clay was my gateway drug for learning the history of art. I was reading everything I could find, first about clay, and then anything that might tell me about why people make and how they feel about what they make. Working with clay – learning how to use it, understanding its properties and limitations – was also important for me in understanding how to solve problems. Unlike, say, studying poetry or philosophy, clay was real – I was learning and then doing. The ability to manage, manipulate and move things around is a gift makers have, and it doesn’t have to stop with the object.
Craft changes your experience of time. When you’re coiling a vessel and you want to come back in from the point where the pot is at its widest, it’s a critical moment and you need to get it right. At some point working with clay became metaphorical for me – I was imagining these objects I made as a stand-in for something else. Then it became metaphysical – not about ceramics at all, but about something different. Craft gave me permission to imagine that nothing in the world is fixed and that the limits of repair, replacement, restoration and construction are the limits of one’s ability, imagination, ingenuity or agency.