It is generally best to meet creative people in their workspace. Relaxed, they can simply point to past and current projects around them as they chat while continuing to work.
I’m sitting in a small white studio with Bouke (pronounced BOW-ka) de Vries as he forms a rose from shards of 15th- and 16th-century blue-and-white porcelain recovered from the Malaysian seabed. He offers the flowerhead to a circle of gilded metal rods stepped around an exploded blanc de Chine figure of Guanyin, before affixing a few more petals with a glue developed for the aeronautics industry (it remains flexible and does not discolour). The sculpture of the serene goddess surrounded by a garland – or, more correctly, bocage – of blue-and-white roses (not tulips!) is emerging before my eyes. I ask if there are any sketches or designs. Bouke shrugs, spins his chair around and puts his feet up, wiping excess glue onto his apron. ‘It’s all designed in my head. I don’t design, I just do,’ he says with a soft Dutch accent.
We could be sitting in any garden shed behind any 1920s house in West London. But the statues of a saluting Chairman Mao outside and the fence made from reclaimed bedroom doors mark this as a special place full of ideas and humour. Bouke shares this approach to life with his partner, Miles Chapman, who after a successful career as an editor on Tatler and Vanity Fair became a jeweller, combining silver chains with expletives (Madonna bought one).
‘Just doing’ runs like a leitmotif throughout Bouke’s career. Born and raised in Utrecht, he studied design in Eindhoven. The course required a year’s worth of work placements, with at least three months overseas. He chose London and simply knocked on the door of Zandra Rhodes, the pink-haired fashion designer. Obviously charmed, she gave him a room in her house and made him her dogsbody for thirteen weeks. (He later returned for six years and can melt your ears with tales of the 1980s celebrities who passed through her pink-painted Notting Hill door.) Meanwhile, he completed his studies and became the first employee of zeitgeist milliner Stephen Jones, who made hats in the New Romantic style for designers like John Galliano plus musicians such as Boy George, who wore one in the video for the 1982 breakthrough hit, ‘Do you really want to hurt me’ (Stephen was an extra, Bouke was just out of shot).
But life in fashion didn’t suit. Bouke outgrew it and – always interested in antiques – enrolled at West Dean College, West Sussex, for the two-year ceramics-restoration course. He loved the 6,000-acre estate surrounding the flint-built mansion where the Edward James Foundation had established a college internationally recognised for excellence. Bouke lived in the Dower House and did a placement at the Victoria and Albert Museum. Anna Plowden, of multifarious restorers, Plowden & Smith, was his assessor. He began his solo career in a shared workspace, rapidly becoming a leading ceramics restorer for the next eighteen years with clients including the National Trust, the Courtauld Gallery, the big auction houses and a rollcall of the leading ceramics dealers.
Restoring ceramics is a wonderful skill. I marvel at Bouke’s hand-eye co-ordination and I simply don’t believe him when he says he has no patience. Ceramics are mankind’s earliest, most widespread and most numerous artefacts. Porcelain has been prized throughout the ages. Today wares often lose much of their value if they get damaged. To many Western eyes, the ideal ceramic repair is invisible. In Japan, however, the centuries-old technique of Kintsugi (golden joinery), also known as Kintsukuroi (golden repair), where broken or missing parts are respectively bound or replaced with lacquer mixed with powdered gold, silver or platinum. This approach treats breakage and repair as part of an object’s history, to be celebrated rather than disguised. The Japanese embrace the flawed or imperfect and Japanese aesthetics values the marks of wear through use. Bouke also employs this repair technique (albeit sometimes using resin), as it fits with his own belief that ‘even though they are broken they still have beauty and value’. He shows a plain pale-glazed delftware plate restored in the Kintsugi technique, and the simplicity of its abstract gold repair looks completely contemporary. Turner-Prize-winning ceramic artist Grayson Perry so admired the technique that he has deliberately smashed two vases so that Bouke would gold-repair them; Bouke remains his restorer of choice.
Alongside his regular restoration work Bouke began to make witty pieces for his own pleasure. Pieces inspired by broken ceramics which gave them new life and pushed their stories on, often in surprising new directions, making extensive use of the skills and techniques he had honed in his restoration practice.
For example, recalling a Roman green glass cinerary urn he had restored at the V&A, he came up with the concept of ‘memory vessels’: whereby the exact original shape of a smashed vase is recreated by scientific glass blowers. Bouke then arranges the broken pieces of the original vase inside the transparent ghostly outline. Sèvres specialist Adrian Sassoon, who also exhibits ‘the best of the best’ in contemporary decorative arts, saw these ‘memory vessels’ in the studio and has been Bouke’s principal gallerist ever since.
So, the transition from artisan to artist had begun; but the repair, recycling and repurposing of valuable historic ceramics remains the thread running through Bouke’s work, which includes a map of China made from blue-and-white dynastic shards and a map of the Netherlands made out of fragments of white domestic Delftware.
His largest work to date, ‘War & Pieces’, is a surtout de table installation created in 2012 for the Holborn Museum, Bath, with the Arts Council. The assembled piece is 8 metres long, 1.5 metres wide and 1.2 metres high and has been exhibited widely at prestigious venues such as the Charlottenburg Palace, Berlin (in 2013), Alnwick Castle and other country houses in the UK, and is destined next for the Wadsworth Atheneum, Connecticut. The centrepiece of this piece (surrounded by a strewn field of smashed white Ikea pottery) is a nuclear mushroom cloud flanked by Derby-style figures of Athena and Hercules. Made by hand, some of the figures were coated in sugar, representing the little-known fact that table figurines were originally made of sugar.
At Pallant House, Chichester, Bouke turned his talents to modernising a display of their famous collection of Bow porcelain. One of his favoured techniques involves grouping and massing similar wares. In 2017 Bouke designed the ‘Golden Box’; displaying historic porcelains almost as an immersive experience, so that visitors to Croome Court in Worcestershire walk through a gold perspex cube; the rich exterior reflecting the Palladian architecture of the otherwise bare dining-room and the Capability Brown landscape beyond. Inside, however, is a dense and dazzling display of Sèvres and Worcester porcelain, even on the ceiling; also featuring the moulded strawberries of the ‘Blind Earl’ service (named after the fifth Earl of Coventry, who lost his eyesight in a hunting accident in 1780 and commissioned the nearby Worcester factory to produce a raised and textured design of leaves and fruit which he could enjoy as much by touch as others did by sight).
Bouke works alone in his shed with only a radio for company. He now spends a little more time on his art than on restoration, working with speed and dexterity. As we leave the studio I admire a wire-framed birdcage mounted with many real jay wings, containing an assembled blue-and-white porcelain egg. In the next room, on crowded shelves, is a large pair of baluster-form ‘memory vases’ alongside a 5-piece Chinese porcelain garniture, destined for the Adrian Sassoon stand at TEFAF. Ahead of me is an arresting figure of a Madonna, carved in wood, about 7 feet tall on a plinth, praying. The original 1920s statue’s surface has been blow-torched to an all-over matt black; her halo is – naturally – a gold-repair blue-and-white Chinese plate. In her chest is a perspex disc encapsulating a white orchid flower. This ‘reliquary’ is another memory piece, marking the time that Bouke received an extravagant spray of white orchids from a client so pleased with how he had restored a Grayson Perry vase for her: Madonna.
Picasso dish as restored by Bouke de Vries; Authors’ collection
