Nick Cave says making ceramic sculptures helped with “forgiveness around the death of my son”

nme.com:

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.