Art and designWith its ceiling rose made of plastic fruit from Tesco, the extraordinary house/museum/art installation that was home to Dennis Severs is a magnificent setting for the witty, wonderful pottery of his partner
I only met Dennis Severs once but it’s an encounter I’ve never forgotten. We were introduced in the basement kitchen of 18 Folgate Street, the 18th-century townhouse in London’s Spitalfields he’d lived in since 1979 , which now bears his name. Severs eyed me up from the Victorian cooking range as a tube train thundered beneath our feet, so close it seemed it might burst through the floor. It was a summer’s day but, as Severs had banished mod cons and lived by candlelight, the room was pitch dark. It was also bitingly cold. I bumped into a chair draped with a mobcap, an old-fashioned type of frilly hat. No wonder it made an impression.
This was 1992 and I had just started at the World of Interiors. I would go on to edit the magazine for 22 years – and to keep a fascinated eye on this house/museum/art installation that, after Severs’ death in 1999, was saved and run by The Spitalfields Trust. When I left the magazine last year, I was asked to curate an exhibition – the house’s first – of ceramics by Simon Pettet, the long-term partner of Severs. I jumped at the chance. It has now opened – but you can’t fully understand the exhibition without first learning about this extraordinary house and its past, both fictional and real.
The Spitalfields that Severs moved to was a far cry from the affluent, hipster haven of today. Dominated by a nocturnal fruit and vegetable market, the area felt run down, desolate and positively Dickensian. At night, figures huddled round braziers for warmth. Although its grand Georgian houses showed how fashionable the area had once been, by the 1970s such buildings were at serious risk from long-term neglect and property developers. Umpteen succumbed to the wrecking ball. Severs was among a bevy of creative pioneers who saw potential in the swanking 18th-century dwellings, built by Huguenot merchants to broadcast their fabulous wealth. By the time he arrived, some of these almost-palaces were being used to store fruit and veg.
But, as his contemporaries agonised over how to renovate their new homes, Severs wanted his finished immediately, however slapdash the restoration. Speed was of the essence: the high-relief plasterwork on the hall ceiling, for example, is actually plastic fruit from Tesco; moulding on the master bedroom’s fire surround, Polyfilla squeezed through a cake icer. For Severs, atmosphere outweighed authenticity: he wasn’t about to let architectural accuracy spoil the drama. He’d come to London from California to study law but found he preferred portering at Christie’s auction house. Charismatic and a born showman, he offered tours round the capital in a horsedrawn carriage. But now he had a stage and he styled the house’s rooms like sets using antiques and curiosities. Tables groaned under still life confections.
Soon, Severs was charging people for guided tours. Paying guests would be taken through these spaces and regaled with stories of the – fictional – Jervis family he claimed once lived here. Candles flickered, fires blazed and friends’ children hid in cupboards to pull fishing wires that made a teacup wobble or a fan fall to the floor. It was as if the Jervises had just left the room. Using smoke, mirrors and the force of his own narrative, he wanted visitors to feel, viscerally, as if they’d been transported 250 years into the past. Only the contents of the chamberpots were unquestionably real.
“You either see it or you don’t,” Severs warned paying guests at the door. He was as irascible as he was charming, so those who didn’t enter into his vision could be turfed out, their entrance fee flung after them. Luckily, Pettet saw “it” immediately and was smitten. He moved in straight away. Severs was 35 when they met outside Heaven nightclub. Pettet was 18 and just starting a ceramics degree at Camberwell School of Art & Crafts.
But it was Severs and life in Spitalfields that proved the greatest spur, setting him on a unique creative path as he increasingly took inspiration from delftware, the blue-and-white pottery made in the 17th and 18th centuries as a cheap alternative to Chinese porcelain. Produced mainly in the Netherlands and Britain, it was characterised by a directness of decoration that Pettet could recreate with an instinctive flick of his brush.
Fogeys they were not. Both loved parties, leather bars and cruisingRather than making copies, however, Pettet subtly subverted conventional motifs to develop a language of his own. Take The Gentrification Piece, the set of 56 tiles made for the master bedroom in 1985. At first glance, you might think it was peopled with generic Dutch figures but, in fact, each tile is a playfully perceptive portrait of a friend and local (plus the house cat, Madge). Taken as a whole, it is a masterclass in comic brevity. Here is the architectural historian Dan Cruickshank carrying a column, and there are the artists Gilbert and George (who moved to nearby Fournier Street in 1968) as Tweedledum and Tweedledee.
Pettet’s obelisks, marriage plates and tiered tulip vases adorned with plump cherubim are equally lively. But the humour of such decoration belies serious knowledge and technical artistry. If Severs craved instant gratification, Pettet’s work was the product of study and precision. The objects he made for the house that were inscribed with the name Jervis – such as the barber’s bowl – give veracity to Severs’ fictional inhabitants by looking authentic.
Although Pettet and Severs lived with the trappings of the 18th century, their sensibilities were contemporary. Fogeys they were not. Stocky and handsome, Pettet preferred Levi’s to tweeds, listened to the Smiths and sent postcards decorated with glitter tape. Both loved parties, leather bars and cruising. “Being outside and extreme,” said Severs, “is what Spitalfields is all about.”
Pettet’s ceramics also marked him as an outsider. Revelling in a smooth surface and figurative decoration, his approach didn’t sit easily with the 1980s vogue for angular pots and textured glazes. Inspired collectors sought him out, but many of his pieces failed to sell. More significantly, he was diagnosed HIV positive in 1984, one of the UK’s earliest cases (the first was identified in December 1981). It’s miraculous he produced the show’s 80-or-so examples in less than 10 years. More extraordinary still that he made such joyous work against the ubiquitous tabloid headlines of a “gay plague” with its then-inevitable outcome. He died on 26 December 1993, less than a month before his 29th birthday. Severs died six years later of cancer.
Now, 30 years after his death, how to give Pettet’s pottery the attention it deserves without compromising the powerful atmosphere of Dennis Severs’ House? Rooms would need to be cleared of their evocative clutter, but I didn’t want to denude them entirely. I decided Pettet’s ceramics should sit alongside tables, chairs, wigs and whatnots, but be distinguished by being set on bright yellow plinths. The colour is taken from the bike he rode to his Bethnal Green studio. He covered its frame in stickers by his hero, Keith Haring.
We’ve also been able to light the show using candles, so the surface of the white tin glaze flickers with life, as it would have done when Severs and Pettet used these rooms. There are no children in cupboards, though. And in the pitch-black basement, we’re handing out torches.
Visitors are sometimes confused by 18 Folgate Street and the dazzling rooms Severs and Pettet created there. Is this a “real” 18th-century interior, untouched for two-and-a-half centuries? The truth is more intriguing. It’s both a remarkable tale of survival and a total fantasy, a grand merchant home from 1724 reimagined by two gay men in the 1980s. It’s a time machine that enables you to step back centuries but also – with anachronistic touches such as Severs’ leather jacket slumped over a stair post – subtly invites you to recall the more recent past. Pettet’s work is double-edged, too. Old but new. Familiar yet surprising. Always engaging. You either see it or you don’t.
Making History: The Ceramic Work of Simon Pettet is at Dennis Severs’ House, London, until 29 October.
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