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The Danish artist died more than 60 years ago, but his provocative, otherworldly work makes for a compellingly futuristic exhibition

Thirty years ago, I saw the work of Axel Salto for the first time. Large vases with strange sprouting growths and dripping, sanguine glazes, something with the head of a faun, objects that looked as if they had been found on a forest floor, all crowded into a vitrine in a poorly lit museum in Copenhagen. The silent museum was full of Danish discretion. And these ceramics looked as if they were barely contained by their glass case. They wanted out. They looked dangerous.

I was writing a book on 20th-century ceramics, attempting to map why artists, potters and designers feel compelled to pick up clay. I started to read the scant texts on Salto in English. And was gripped. Here was someone who offered more than ruralist solace: someone I wanted to spend time with. And I have. The decades pass and I am still gripped by this poet who used clay, this potter who wrote that a ceramic vessel can be provocative, can express anxiety as well as delight.  

For the last few years, I have been delving deeper into Salto’s huge archives of drawings, his notebooks, writings and ceramics — and now, finally, Playing with Fire, the first major exhibition of his work in Britain, opens in November in the beautiful Chipperfield-designed galleries of the Hepworth Wakefield. Previously seen at the CLAY Museum of Ceramic Art in Denmark and at the recently opened Kunstsilo in Norway, it is my attempt to bring Salto the painter, graphic artist, textile designer, book illustrator, magazine publisher, writer of manifestos and poetry, an evangelist for play and a powerful advocate for art in children’s lives, and — above all — a fearsome artist with clay, into the glorious light.

Salto was born in Copenhagen in 1889 and studied at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts. He encountered Picasso and Matisse in Paris in 1916, founded a formidable literary magazine, and then spent most of the 1920s in France. Salto began to make and design ceramics early in his career, working both with stoneware and with the Royal Porcelain Factory in Copenhagen, and it is estimated that he made over 3,000 ceramics by the time of his death in 1961.

I was determined not to curate a retrospective: Salto resists tidiness. In the archives are photographs of his own exhibitions in the 1950s, how he layered his paintings and covetable textiles, placed his pots low down or at eye level, relished surprise. So this exhibition is a series of encounters with him through his exploration of colour and line and metamorphosis. One whole section centres on play. Salto believed that you have to make a mess, that you have to pick things up and handle them and put them down and change them. So we have made a play pavilion where you can recreate his 1943 children’s book that shows tumbling acrobats and falling crockery, picking up woodblock stamps, pressing them into ink blocks and making your own images. In the other iterations of the exhibition, this space has been full of inky adults. It is a joy.

But the first encounter is the kiln. It had to be.

There is a photograph of Salto that I love. It was taken in 1956 and he is standing inside his kiln surrounded by stacked saggars, the rough protective containers in which pots are fired. He is looking at the three tall tapering forms held on a textured drum, sinister and ritualistic. The work is “Kraftens Kerne” (“The Core of Power”), and it seems to be looking back at him.

I took this image as the impetus to create a dark and shadowy room — a kiln — in which dozens of Salto’s ceramics are on open display. It feels as if these objects have just been unpacked, still in the zone of transformation that he wrote about so lyrically. They seem to be held in the point of change: glazes are caught in flux, vases swell as if about to burst. The vase, he writes, “is like a living organism; the body buds, the buds develop, and sprouting, even prickly, vases are the result of this life”. From his twenties until the very end of his life he returned repeatedly to Ovid’s Metamorphoses, translating them into Danish, illustrating them, sculpting Acteon again and again. He calls this moment of metamorphosis “the burning now”.

Surrounding Salto’s kiln are the huge black vessels I started making in Denmark last year, working with the extraordinary team at the Tommerup Ceramic Workshop. They are by far the largest vessels that I have ever made: pots to touch, to sound, to be large enough to lean against. They are made with a rough red clay that fires to a black of such density that it seems close to silver in some lights. While they were still damp I started writing into them, but the writing became scribing, marking, erasing, scribbling. I began with parts of Rilke’s Duino Elegies but soon these words disappeared into the clay, overwritten and smudged back into the surface. They hold flaws and coincidences, record the passage of fire on clay.

It all comes back to fire. In an early text Salto describes a climb up Vesuvius and the descent into the crater, the pumice stone under his feet, the moving, metallic lava, stone and fire. All kinds of things can go wrong in a kiln. If the heat isn’t evenly distributed then pots can dunt: they crack. Sometimes you discover this when you unbrick the kiln, sometimes days afterwards. And vessels can warp, move back to the state when you had just thrown them. Clay finds you out. That nudge, the fissure smoothed over by a thumb, the handle joined in a hurry, a declivity: it all comes back. Salto loves the “flaw or coincidence” that occurs in the kiln, because it holds the possibility that it “can be transformed into something beautiful and maybe point to new directions which will lead to new results”. A denser mottled glaze that might make, perhaps, the fur of a faun, a weathered rock, the broken colours of a seashell.

But more often a pot has just gone wrong.

I know a lot about this. All potters do. I built my first kiln in Herefordshire 43 years ago. It looked like a very small chapel. I built it so poorly that I found myself awake at three in the morning trying to coax the temperature higher, caulking the gaps between bricks, altering the dampers to see if I could get more pull of air through the kiln, praying. Hundreds and hundreds of pots dunted. Dozens I chucked over the hedge into the stream below the workshop. I broke several thousand.

This is common territory for all of us who use clay. But Salto understood the image of breaking is also a transformation. In the exhibition is a painting “that depicts a tray with cups falling to the ground. The painting is a depiction of the burning now, the tense and uneasy but yet strangely enchanted second it takes, from the moment when the cups start to slide until they are shattered against the ground. The falling, turning cups stop in the air for a moment like a bush that grows from the bottom cup that has already burst, but whose shards still stand in the air during the reaction of the moment of the blasting.”

Here is time standing still, the slowing of world and body and breath. There is nothing you can do to catch this cascade of cups as they fall. Your experience of this moment is both caught in the knowledge of what is happening and has happened, the slippage and the sound of breakage.

The burning moment defies the banality of a present or past or future tense. Transformation is fissile. Objects hold their transformative, burning-now in trust. If you can change you can change again. The smashed cups talk to the clay in the potter’s hand.

Breaking, dropping, falling cups are an act of remaking too.

Making and unmaking and remaking, the beginning and ending of life as clay. One thing becoming something else, becoming other. A burning, breaking, glorious, noisy, now.