Nick Cave's Ceramic Sympathy for the Devil

Being among the top 1% of Nick Cave listeners on Spotify, I wondered if his art would speak to me as strongly as his music does.

Not to be confused with the eponymous American artist best known for his sound suits, Cave's exhibition The Devil—A Life has just opened at Xavier Hufkens in Brussels, where it continues through 11 May.

The singer, who is best known for murder ballads like 'Where the Wild Roses Grow' and love songs such as 'Into My Arms', is presenting 17 stations of the Devil, glazed ceramics depicting Old Scratch's story from birth to death.

Examining the life of the Devil through curiously quaint ceramics is a game in keeping with Cave's music, where he sometimes adopts a dark persona to tell a terrible tale in catchy verse.

In the 1988 song 'Up Jumped the Devil', for instance, Cave sings, 'Who's that hanging from the gallows tree / His eyes are plucked but he looks like me / Now who's that swinging from the gallows tree / Up jumped the Devil and he took my soul from me.'

In the exhibition, the Devil appears first as a rosy-cheeked child snoozing against the flank of a red horse. He grows up and falls in love with a blue-eye blonde woman, but also takes the hand of a male sailor. He fights a lion and goes to war, accompanied by six golden bunnies but returns grim-faced, his horse wading through a sea of blood and skulls.

Most disturbing, especially knowing that Cave lost two sons in the past decade, is the sculpture of the Devil killing a child. The Devil is racked with remorse and tears form a river at his feet. He bleeds to death, and in the last figurine, titled 'Devil Forgiven', a child looks down on a horned skeleton.

The ceramics follow the style of Victorian Staffordshire flatback figurines, which were mass produced in English factories from 1837 to 1900. Made for display on mantelpieces and in cabinets, these figurines are distinct from most contemporary art world ceramics, which are typically unique and made to be viewed from any angle. Their symbolism is overt and unfashionably Biblical: a goat or a serpent for the devil, lambs for innocence, rabbits for resurrection.

Crucially, the Devil can be understood as an agent of injustice and cruelty in a world otherwise governed by a good and loving God.

Knowing a thing or two about this cruelty, Cave recently spoke about death and loss to The Guardian.

'These losses are just incorporated into the artistic flow and they move in a direction that is beyond your capacity to rein in,' he said. 'They're just sitting at the end of everything you do. In the end, the ceramics are a story about a man's culpability in the loss of his child, and addressing that in a way I wasn't really able to do with music. That's what happened without any intention.'

'I think that the death of my son, to some degree, completed me as a human being, and allowed me to turn around and see the world and see everyone in it as suffering individuals, as broken individuals, and understand the perilous nature of life and the value of life, Cave told UnHeard. 'That changed my outlook on things hugely—completely. To understand and respect people, all people.'

I have never lost a child, but just the possibility of my daughter dying cripples me with anxiety. I remember discovering Cave's 'The Ship Song' lying in bed when she was a newborn. My new daughter, my new life felt so beautiful yet fragile. I was given her just like that, for free, but with the responsibility to guard and protect her, and I could fail. I listened to the song in a seemingly endless loop (and have done so ever since) as it was the one thing that made me feel safe, as if everything would be ok again. I told my partner that I had found the song, the song that we could play at both our wedding (he disagreed) and my funeral. How could I ever feel scared or lonely or desperate again if there was a song that held such power to heal me?

'Music, of all the creative forms, best repairs the heart,' Cave has said himself. 'This may be its actual purpose...I know this because it has restored me and has been my salvation. Music as a form radiates love and makes things better.'

Looking at Nick Cave's art is different from listening to his music. Music creates a feeling the moment you hear it. It enters your nervous system. With art it is more complicated. You need to take time to let it sink in, you need to really look. To accept the weirdness. To ask questions. What does it all mean? Why, of all the subjects in the world, did Nick Cave choose to talk about the devil's life?

In 1942, the poet W.H. Auden was asked the question 'Do you know what the Devil looks like?' and answered 'The Devil looks like me'. This feels true for Cave's figurines too.

'The devil is essentially just this man with horns', he explains. 'I'm very proud of these things. I guess it is autobiographical in some way—not that I relate to the devil in his evilness, but I relate to the devil as a character seeking forgiveness in some way.'

When Faust asks Mephistoles who he is, the Devil replies, 'part of that force that always wills the evil and always produces the good'. Many acts of cruelty are followed by acts of kindness. No challenge is without growth.

Cave's Devil loses his innocence, gets hurt and hurts others in return. He sees a flawed individual, someone who explores dark corners of his mind, someone who has failed and is punished not only by society but also by his own guilt.

In creating his ceramic sculptures, Nick Cave has found the details in the devil—the loss of innocence, self-recrimination, and a measure of forgiveness—that speak to his own experience.

These artworks don't work on me the way his music does. They enter and exit my heart rather swiftly, without the same healing power. But they do linger in my brain, raising a lot of questions, making me think about culpability, guilt and forgiveness.

The Devil—A Life is directed to all of us. No matter how broken and how guilty. Because in the end, we all are full of flaws and self contempt, and yet all of us are worthy of forgiveness, respect and joy. Even the devil. Even Nick Cave.