Theaster Gates: 'Craft permitted me to imagine that nothing in the world is fixed'

The Chicago-based artist Theaster Gates is impossible to categorise – his work shifts seamlessly between ceramics, urban planning, music and construction, often combining all these elements at once. Whether restoring buildings in his home town in neighbourhoods blighted by underinvestment, performing with his band The Black Monks, or shaping clay into monumental vessels – such as Voulkos #1, made of bisque-fired stoneware with paint – his work is imbued with spirituality and critique, underpinned by a sense of pragmatism. We met him at his Serpentine Pavilion in London in 2022.

Clay was my gateway drug for learning the history of art. I was reading everything I could find, first about clay, and then anything that might tell me about why people make and how they feel about what they make. Working with clay – learning how to use it, understanding its properties and limitations – was also important for me in understanding how to solve problems. Unlike, say, studying poetry or philosophy, clay was real – I was learning and then doing. The ability to manage, manipulate and move things around is a gift makers have, and it doesn’t have to stop with the object.

Craft changes your experience of time. When you’re coiling a vessel and you want to come back in from the point where the pot is at its widest, it’s a critical moment and you need to get it right. At some point working with clay became metaphorical for me – I was imagining these objects I made as a stand-in for something else. Then it became metaphysical – not about ceramics at all, but about something different. Craft gave me permission to imagine that nothing in the world is fixed and that the limits of repair, replacement, restoration and construction are the limits of one’s ability, imagination, ingenuity or agency.

Tar was my first craft, and ceramics my second. I like using materials that are loaded with their own histories. I use tar because it comes out of histories of labour that are really important to me, as well as having a relationship with the work my father did as a roofer. It feels like a generational gift. When I’m in Japan, people will tell me, ‘I’m a ninth-generation potter’. Well, I’m a second-generation roofer. I like that I don’t have to separate my dad’s type of hard, non-art-market-driven labour from what is said to be artistic labour. My dad was painting, just as a painter is painting. He had tremendous skill and he spent many years perfecting and sharing his craft.

Part of the pleasure of making is figuring out something you thought couldn’t be done. Just as making art isn’t about how much money you can spend on fabrication, fixing cities isn’t just about how much money you throw at a problem – it’s often about using the materials you have and working out whether there are ways in which a place might heal itself and become unbroken. I’ve come to believe that the work that I’m involved in with rebuilding neighbourhoods is an ongoing attempt to deal with the pain I experienced when I was a kid, from the lack of investment in the city – my experiences of growing up in an environment that the government has stopped caring about, and has disinvested in, in a way that’s racialised and prejudiced. The act of regeneration is me telling myself that things are possible, when people said they weren’t.

Early in my career, I had a point to prove to the world. I was saying, ‘You’re not going to do this? Watch me do it.’ Now I just think there are certain things I’m supposed to do and it has nothing to do with anybody else. When I make a bowl, I’m not necessarily doing it because I think the bowl is going to be purchased, but because of the pleasure it gives me. Similarly, when I build today, it’s not always about others – it’s sometimes just for my love of building. There’s a part of my work that’s about privacy and interiority, and then there’s work that’s more public. Black Chapel, my pavilion for the Serpentine Gallery in 2022, is a very public vessel, for example, and then there are the pots I just make for me.

Back in 2004, I felt a bit stagnant in my practice. Someone I studied with suggested that I do a residency in Tokoname, in Japan. Since then, I’ve never stopped going back. My ‘Afro-Mingei’ philosophy and aesthetic developed over time as I grappled with the fact that, when I’m away from Japan, I’m engaged in an ideological conversation about race and making work about the Black American experience, while also being constantly inspired by the disciplinary charge I’d got from Japan. It was an acknowledgement that my work isn’t a response to a western, white male canon. I’ve got no beef with minimalism or conceptualism, but I understand now that part of me is rooted in something else – a set of values and religious and aesthetic practices that are non-western.

I used to think that I had to do singular things – make an object that can be respected as a work of art or a song that can be respected as a song. I don’t feel that way now: I’m more interested in the unity of practices, rather than segregating them for people who are, for example, only interested in craft or only in music. There’s an anchor to my practice, but there are also significant appendages that float around it and make the work richer. I’m as invested in music as I am in sculpture and craft.

I still get time to make, but not every day – it’s more seasonal now. But I like when I’m away from the studio because it allows me to do another kind of making. Working with tar and throwing clay – they feel like equal parts of the making process alongside thinking, writing and reading. The execution of the work no longer feels like the total thing.

Theaster Gates: Young Lords and their Traces is published by Phaidon, £49.95; theastergates.com