Jacqueline Poncelet: 'Knowing why you’re alive is a wonderful thing'

The savviest craft buff would find it tricky to sum up the work of Jacqueline Poncelet – even describing her practice as ‘multidisciplinary’ seems like an understatement. Since launching her career in the early 1970s, the Belgian-born, UK-raised artist has produced everything from understated bone china bowls and patchwork carpets, to vibrant weavings, paintings, and intricately patterned facades for buildings (most notably Wrapper, which has blanketed a towering wall beside London’s Edgware Road Tube station since 2012).

Poncelet’s inexhaustible curiosity for materials and making techniques was recently celebrated in a solo exhibition at the Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art (Jacqueline Poncelet: In the Making, 1 February–23 June 2024). I sat down with her as she looked back on her career just ahead of its opening.

'I’d always been one of those people who fiddled around, making clothes for my toys or knitting stuff. My father was the same. He didn’t particularly enjoy reading and wasn’t interested in television; he liked to be making things. My mother was the opposite: she loved reading but didn’t sew or knit. In that sense, it was a sort of divided household – not that it felt that way, but it was interesting in retrospect.

I went to art college in Wolverhampton. At the end of my foundation course, I went on to do a BA in ceramics, but it wasn’t entirely that – it was ceramics with interior and product design. Don’t think of it as a sophisticated package: it involved a lot of playing around with Perspex. We also managed to make most materials fairly dangerous – we used chloroform to melt things, mixed resins, and would launch cracking and smoking bits of work over the college walls before they exploded. It was fun, but you wouldn’t be allowed to do that now.

When people look at prospectuses for undergraduate courses, they have no experience in the art world – they’re going into things naively. I had no idea what I was signing up for. I knew that I had enjoyed doing ceramics during my foundation, and I had a boyfriend who was studying the same thing – it was all deeply superficial. There was no great master plan for the future of life, just a handsome man with a scooter and a nice duffle coat.

I certainly didn’t know the potential of ceramics; it was almost a time of innocence when nobody knew much. There was a magazine called Craft Horizons that would come from the US extremely intermittently. Through that, Ron Nagle, Richard Shaw and other superstars in the American ceramics world entered my life and seemed so at odds with what was happening in England.

It was absolutely fascinating. I’d like to describe my life as an almost constant accretion, where I gather things as I go along. I’ve always thought that saying ‘a rolling stone gathers no moss’ is absolutely rubbish, because I’ve gathered so much ‘moss’.

I started off quite modestly with pattern. I’d come from an era where pattern and form had to be logical: they had to relate to each other. But I wanted to find some way of escaping from that. Then I won the British Council’s Bicentennial Arts Fellowship in 1978, and I was given this fantastic opportunity to go to America with my family for a year. I was able to see the way that pattern and architecture came together in New York, the reflections in windows.

Then we travelled the East Coast and crossed through the Arizona desert, where I experienced a different kind of pattern – that of the landscape. This was fantastic as well, and I started to make work that responded to it. You can never underestimate the power of a new place. It sharpens your sense of an alternative reality, your sense of self and the sense of the place you’ve come from.

When I started to show in places like the Whitechapel Gallery and the Venice Biennale, it was a very different time. It wasn’t like now, where artists like Grayson Perry can shift between the different camps of art and craft. Things were fairly divided, and there came a point where it seemed like I needed to find out what the possibilities were for me and for the way I worked. As a consequence of that, I stopped working in ceramics and started to work with other materials.

Have I been lucky? I started off making really tiny bone china things, and then I did Wrapper, which is enormous. Even I think, ‘how was that possible?’ How did I have that understanding of scale? You just have to shrug your shoulders and say, ‘I have absolutely no idea, but thank goodness.’ [Artworks] don’t come from nowhere, but at the same time, you’re not aware of your full potential until you’re confronted with something that pushes you forward.

There’s no ‘typical day’ for me, I’m not a lover of routine. As you get older, you have a very different pace to your life. I can work in the morning, or decide to work in the afternoon, or just start working in the evening. I might go to the studio and decide to use watercolour, or I’ll go to use clay.

At the end of the day, I might think, ‘that’s shit and a total waste of time’, but then three weeks later, I might look at it and think, ‘wow, that was fantastic!’ So it’s very important to understand that I’m not trying to achieve something, there’s not an imagined goal.

I remember when I first went to art college and realised, ‘this is why I’m alive.’ It’s hard being an artist because nobody wants you. I’m not saying that we don’t have a function in society, but nobody asks you to get up in the morning and make them a nice bit of art. Everything is coming out of you. Obviously, if you become incredibly successful and famous, there are demands on you and even then, it’s complicated. But my God, just knowing why you’re alive is a wonderful thing. ‘

Jacqueline Poncelet will be giving an exclusive talk and tour of her objects held in the National Collection of Craft at a special event on the evening 5 September at Crafts Council's new collection store. Gold members – find your invitation in your inbox or contact us if you haven't received it

From our archive: 5 must-read articles about Jacqueline Poncelet

• 'That was then, this is now' (2013) – Jacqueline Poncelet interviewed by Corinne Julius
• 'Pattern crazy' (2002)– interview with Jacqueline Poncelet and Carol McNicoll by Jonathan Bell, about a Crafts Council exhibition celebrating a renewed interest in pattern
• 'The critic's eye' (1992)– Griselda Gilroyd discusses her appreciation of ceramic work by Jacqueline Poncelet
• 'American graffiti' (1981) – Jacqueline Poncelet discusses her new ceramics with Rosemarie Pitts
• 'Outside tradition' (1973)– Fiona Adamceski writes about Glenys Barton’s geometric shapes and Jacqueline Poncelet’s translucence and subtly irregular shaped bowls