Interview | Artsy’s Rob Sharp speaks with “Up and Comer” Jesse Wine

Fresh out of our dalliance with Frieze Fair, Garth Clark penned a lengthy editorial about young, “puckish,” UK artist Jesse Wine. That piece can be read here.

Rob Sharp of Artsy recently wrote an article profiling this emerging talent from the UK. That interview can be read here in its entirety and portions of it are reproduced below.

Above image: Jesse Wine, I Can Like Anything, 2015. Photograph courtesy of Limoncello. 

The workspace of up-and-coming ceramist Jesse Wine houses a towering, multi-faceted sculpture for Frieze London when I catch him a couple weeks ahead of the fair. In addition to this piece, earmarked for Frieze’s Sculpture Park, Wine is preparing a solo presentation for his London gallery Limoncello—part of Focus, a section dedicated to emerging galleries—and will also have work on view with Glasgow representative Mary Mary. Engaging and gregarious, Wine enthusiastically elaborates on the Sculpture Park project’s genesis: a reimagining of habitual collections of dried fruit from his father’s kitchen sideboard.

…

“He would stack fruit in these little piles and me and my brother would do it with him,” says 31-year-old Wine when we speak. (He’ll turn 32 mid-way through Frieze’s run.) “It was like playing, in a way. It was my first legitimate experience of something you might call art—taking an inexplicable, really idiosyncratic approach to something that is in some way familiar. So much of it informs the way I work now, but it’s taken me forever to figure that out.”

…

“My work draws on being British and certain specific uses of language,” says Wine. The titles he chooses are but one example of his interest in the everyday. (Recent artworks have included The whole vibe of everything and I can like anything (both 2015).) “The idea for me is that if you are telling a story, there’s an opportunity with the text to describe something outside the art that completely informs the way the work is received.” He says this stems from wanting to “be as generous as possible with the work, to communicate with large audience. I want it to feel accessible to the everyman.”

…

Fast forward to Wine’s debut solo show at Limoncello in 2012, which threw critics a curve ball. A raised walkway reimagined the gallery as a Japanese Zen garden, the floor covered in gravel and Wine’s immaculately finished objects—basket structures, slathered in glaze; other pieces round, humpy or hive-like. He already evinced an obsessive care in the craft of making, something he often describes in spiritual terms. “You are somehow reflecting your psychological and social position in life at any given moment,” he says of his relationship with his material, though this sentiment informs everything he does. “I spend a large part of the day in a studio alone, which I love, don’t get me wrong. But it is therapy.”

…

“This area is one of the few genuinely successful culturally diverse places in central London,” says Wine. “It’s the old feeling of London before it became culturally flattened or deadened. [We had] a manifesto for what we wanted the place to be—open, in a way.” He credits the space and its constant turnover of artists and projects with some of his own current drive: “To have somewhere where people are finishing shows in your studio is really fucking helpful. It gets you in the habit of finishing things.”

Love contemporary ceramic art + design? Let us know in the comments.