KEITH HALLETT: Ceramics
19 March – 12 April 2025
Keith Hallett’s work goes back 55 years to his first architectural piece - a ‘collegiate’ arrangement of 63 terraced houses around a communal garden. For this he won a RIBA award in 1975. Hallett cut his business and architectural teeth on such projects while continuing his housing work primarily in conservation projects throughout central Bristol.
It was during this time that with his wife Katy he bought semi-derelict CHELVEY COURT - a remarkable Stuart (Jacobean) country house whose odd history has kept its antiquity in aspic. CHELVEY has five acres of rough and stagnant farmland alongside a mainline railway running on an embankment. Landfill permission was immediately sought from the LA and a contract with the roads and groundworks contractor of a large N Bristol housing estate. This arrangement, importing 25000 cubic metres into CHELVEY included the planting of over 1000 trees which are all now mature after forty years. Terraces, an amphitheatre and the trees have brought life - flora and fauna and huge numbers of birds back to CHELVEY.
Keith Hallett privately regards CHELVEY as his grand oeuvre. However, as Keith’s home was flowering, he was asked by Bristol Council to invent a new kind of building to house their housing and social services departments newly being combined in local neighbourhood locations rather than centralised. There followed fourteen such offices, the jewel in this crown being at Hartclifffe, which was then the roughest neighbourhood in Bristol.
Ceramics
Keith Hallett is fascinated with duality and juxtaposition. As an architect who has become a ceramicist his sculptural works occupy the space between function and non-function; craft-based art and ideas-based art working with a kind of controlled stream of consciousness. It is as if he has finally been let loose on a material that he can play with and create with, without any dire consequences.
His pots are a playful take on classic container forms: collaged slabs with overhangs and angles, using a range of colours which neither match nor clash. The vessels are made, deconstructed and rebuilt, combining the clay slabs back together to create new and as yet unseen shapes expressing a wonderful feeling of freedom. The way he makes marks varies constantly, sometimes making unusual marks either imagined or half remembered and at other times carefully researched. He seems most comfortable in a state of constant exploration, devouring influences and inspirations, mastering techniques and traditions as he goes.
CHELVEY UNFROCKED film 7mins
The exhibition is accompanied by a short film by MacraeBell Productions about the house and containing much of Hallett’s ceramic work.
