Hylton Nel spent much of his early life on a cattle farm in the Northern Cape. A childhood game involved painting pictures on pieces of eggshell after the geese had hatched, and hiding them in secret places on the farm. This furnishing of the land- scape with a transient self-made culture – an attentiveness, an insistent delight in the view from the margins – is a thread one might follow throughout the artist’s practice. “One day [my grandmother] asked each of us to draw a house and she would say which was the best,” recounts Nel*. “My cousin drew a very neat linear house and I drew a scribbly kind of house. My grandmother chose my cousin’s as the best, and I burst into tears. She tried to comfort me by saying, ‘Never mind, you were not meant to be an artist’. This was no comfort because I thought I was meant to be an artist. So I just cried.” The gleam in the harsh farm landscape is gathered and painted and scattered repeatedly across Nel’s unconventional art student youth, in the ongoing isolation of queer identity, and in social and political turmoil across three-quarters of a century. It is getting used to the handwriting of one’s own trajectory – scribbly, uncompromising, benevolent. This is the work of the “artist-potter”: life lived in the scribbly kind of house, life made liveable, learning to live in it, eating off the plate of it. Nel’s ceramic world is populated with plates, bowls, figures, and vessels – forms which have travelled a long way, laced with centuries of making. Informed by a deep appreciation for art history, Nel has spent much of his life collecting treasure – a life of refuge in beautiful, often historical objects. His Calitzdorp home is filled with dynasties of Chinese ceramics, busts from Antiquity, neolithic jade, 19th-century Italian marble and Victorian Staffordshire. These references slip into Nel’s work in unexpected ways: the brushstrokes of Chinese Swatow ware or traditional Chinese painting have been playfully abstracted, floating amidst turquoise glaze, count- less figures of youthful red-lipped Madonnas (with child), aroused male nudes à la grecque, and biblical scenes that have been squashed within the confines of a bowl.