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’.”
‘Your ideas are valid’ … with mentor Emma Rodgers. Photograph: Christopher Thomond/The Guardian
That, the skip and a third-class degree meant Vegas went off in what he calls “my little huff”, and became a successful comic instead, his former life relegated to a gag (he has sent up the potters’ wheel love scene from the film Ghost more than once). “In a way, I feel I’ve cheated myself,” he says, when we leave his work to be installed. Showbiz, he says, was “a big detour. I never made the time [for art], and I wish I had. I have so much time to make up for.” Now, in his 50s, he is doing just that. Last month’s Channel 4 documentary followed Vegas as he made a public art installation in St Helens, Merseyside, where he lives, and his joint exhibition with Rodgers at Liverpool’s Walker Art Gallery ended in June after more than a year.
In the 90s, comedy replaced what he had been trying to do in art. Standup, realised Vegas, “was something I could do on my own creative terms. It’s yours, rise or fall.” Often drunk, unruly and anarchic, his stage persona Johnny Vegas was a vulnerable but demonic figure – the counterweight to his more anxious and sensitive real self, Michael Pennington. His 1997 Edinburgh show brought awards, attention and, inevitably, TV offers. “Then when you go into TV, everybody has an opinion and that slowly seeps into you.”
Whenever I’ve needed it most – in education, in later life – art turned up and rescued me
Television tamed him. On panel shows, adverts and presenting jobs, the character of Johnny had lost that edge. “You wonder what younger comics make of you,” says Vegas. “As you get older, you also go: how much time have you got left to make a difference? Rather than just have a career, and cling on to it? Don’t make telly for the sake of making telly.” It was the same feeling, he says, that made him not want to sit at a wheel, turning out pots. “I’m really fortunate that whenever I’ve needed it most – in education, in later life – art turned up and rescued me, and gave me a different sense of purpose.”
A chance meeting a few years ago with the renowned Wirral-based sculptor Rodgers led to an invitation to spend a day at her studio. She helped Vegas make a Jester, a forlorn figure representing Vegas’s unease. “That was a big point in my career where you’re going, what is success? Where has it took you?” Returning to art was “like this light had come on that had been dimming. There’s still a self-conscious, working-class part of me, but Emma really made me go, ‘you’re an artist, your ideas are valid’.” Vegas now has space in her studio, working in several media including clay, bronze and 3D printing, and Rodgers has become a mentor, chivvying him when he needs it, or making him stop before he goes too far on a piece.
Glazed and confused … Vegas eyes his efforts. Photograph: Christopher Thomond/The Guardian
For many years Vegas had also been appalled at “the constant decline of art in education”. In 2022, he was diagnosed with ADHD, which explained a lot about his life. As a child, growing up in the 70s and 80s, “I was just seen as this slacker: ‘He refuses to try, or to concentrate.’ But I just wasn’t interested.” Art was what he was interested in – his father, a joiner, lobbied for Vegas to get a place doing A-level art, because of his obsessive drawing – and it worries him that we’re not providing the same opportunities to children today. “If they’re not necessarily academic, but they have gifts that lie elsewhere, they are being ignored. As we’re becoming more neurodiverse aware, we’re stepping further away from something where [many of those] children can excel.”
Throughout the time Vegas was considering all this, and his rediscovery of art, the world was afflicted by the pandemic. He spent the first lockdown working out of his local pub, doing food drops for frontline workers and sourcing PPE. “It was the most rewarding thing I’ve done in years,” he says. He was busy, felt useful and his son was living with him (he has two children from two former marriages). The later lockdowns were harder – he spent them in isolation and struggled. He’d had a kiln installed at home but wasn’t creating much. The negative aspects of his then-undiagnosed ADHD “flourished and took over”. He developed agoraphobia which, for someone in the public eye, was particularly difficult. “Never leaving the house, this fear of expectations of what people want. Then everyone was back to the ‘new normal’, and I just couldn’t make the adjustment. It had a much more adverse effect on me than I thought, which is why, I suppose, now a lot of my work is still about re-engaging with people, society, and finding acceptance as ‘Michael’.”
I had dream of flying when I was nine. I’ve chased it every since
The idea for this current work came out of that period, “of how the first time somebody hugged me, it felt strange. Being so averse to a hug had suddenly become so alien. I want to investigate this idea of reconnection, and I wanted to find a way of capturing moments in time, how people interpret a hug.” A hug can feel overwhelming, or “it just lasts too long with somebody. It can be interpreted like an invasion of space.” Mostly though, he was aiming to express “the robust nature of love” – some of the “huggers” were couples, but others were friends, or parents and children. “I think those pieces are going, ‘Have a bit more faith in what you’ve got around you, family and friends, and society. Don’t give up’.”
Tunnel vision: Vegas looks through his ceramic sculpture. Photograph: Christopher Thomond/The Guardian
Vegas is about to tour the live stage show of the beloved cult BBC sitcom Ideal, but he can’t really see a return to standup comedy. “You’ve got to be hungry for it, and right now, I’m hungry for sculpture.” The idea of flight is prevalent in his previous work. The clay form, the result of a hug with his partner Vikki, is daubed with slip which looks like wings. When he was a child, he had a recurring dream he could fly. “And then from about the age of nine I never had that dream again. I think it was the first time I started experiencing anxiety and that replaced that hopefulness. So there’s that I’m always chasing.”
Does he care what people think about his work, if they like it or not? “I’ve always cared what people think,” he says. “I think that’s what created Johnny – he became a defence mechanism.” But with art, he says, he craves a debate. “It takes me back to being a teenage student in the pub and people going, ‘Why do I pay my taxes so you can make bloody ashtrays?’ I embraced being an outsider in art. It was the first time that I went, I’m grateful to be different. I don’t want to be a total outcast but I’m grateful that this winds you up, that you would have such a reaction to art.” He laughs and says, “I’m absolutely prepared for somebody to go, ‘You haven’t finished it off. It’s got no handles. Did you drop that?’” In his standup shows, he loved a good heckle, as long as it was considered, rather than plain abusive. The difference with comedy, he says, is “it’s you in a room, with everybody listening, it’s the arena of the unwell. The beauty of making an object and leaving it open to interpretation is far more freeing.”
The British Ceramics Biennial is at various venues in Stoke-on-Trent from 6 September to 19 October