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.
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.
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.
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 . It’s miraculous he produced the show’s 80-or-so examples in less than 10 years.
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