In a cavernous room in an old pottery factory, Johnny Vegas is approaching his work and his face is a delight. “Is it wrong to love your own pieces?” he says, seeing his sculptures for the first time in the place they will be shown, on a table lit by beams of dusty sunlight. Called Just Be There, and made in collaboration with the sculptor Emma Rodgers, each form is the result of two people embracing around a soft clay column. The huggers are mostly from Stoke-on-Trent, where Vegas’s work in the British Ceramics Biennial, one of more than 60 artists included, is being shown. Some are collapsed – thanks to a bear hug. Some are more restrained, the clay holding the imprint of people’s feelings about personal space. They’re robust and beautiful, and Vegas looks absolutely thrilled.
The first time he produced a body of work to be on public show, it was for his ceramics degree finals and it ended up accidentally being thrown in a skip. To his tutors’ dismay he insisted on making sculpture rather than the technical ceramics he was supposed to be doing, and had produced a series of abstract female forms. He adds with a laugh: “At our final show, everybody kept writing, ‘I like your candlesticks’.”
