CHIT-CHAT-EAU Episode No. 11: Joseph Dupré, Artist and GP

Welcome to CHIT-CHAT-EAU: Chateau Orlando's series of interviews hosted by our Co-Founder and Creative Director Luke Edward Hall.

Our eleventh guest is Joseph Dupré. An artist and practising NHS General Practitioner, Dupré is currently presenting a new ceramic exhibition that reimagines family doctors as medieval knights; honouring the courage, compassion and heroism often overlooked in modern healthcare.

Can you tell us about your new exhibition with Lyndsey Ingram, Knight Shift?

This show is my first solo show with the gallery, which is very exciting. It is an idea that started as a kernel several years ago, before an opportunity came to start making the full body of work as a solo presentation. The making took over 18 months. The show tells the story of my life as a practising doctor, the ups and downs faced by myself and many other doctors. I decided to portray colleagues, friends and mentors of mine, all GPs, as effigies of medieval knights on ceramic tombs, with copious use of grandiose gold and platinum lustre. The idea was to celebrate and reframe these family doctors as heroes, highlighting real life events where they have saved a life in an emergency on the street, or in a hospital or GP surgery. I think the whole show is a pushback against the common narrative of 'GP bashing', which takes place in the press, the Daily Mail being one of the biggest offenders. These negative stories encourage people to blame GPs themselves for things like the long wait for an appointment, using adjectives such as 'greedy', or 'lazy'. This is a very sad undermining of a crucial, dedicated public-serving profession, and I hope my exhibition makes people think again about their own neighbourhood GP.

When did you begin making ceramics, and how do your two careers as an artist and an NHS GP weave together?

I have always done art, specifically sculpture. most of my birthday presents I gifted to my parents as a child were thrown together cardboard sculptures that I would spend hours assembling locked away in the living room, much to my sister's frustration. The pieces that spring to mind were a 'working' cardboard TV with scrolling drawings mounted on cardboard rollers, and a strongman complete with cardboard dumbbells, which spent years slowly deteriorating in my father's study. I did art all the way through school, including A-level, but when I went to medical school art very much took a back seat to my 14 years of study. The only exception was a period of study at the Royal Drawing School in London, undertaken during a brief hiatus in my medical study. This was an important period formatively, as it got me into printmaking, but also reminded me that my first love was sculpture. I also met my future wife Pollyanna Johnson on this course!

When I finally finished my specialist training in general practice in 2019, I was able to fulfil the promise I had always made to myself – to come back to art in a meaningful way. The benefit of GP is that you have some sense of control of schedule, which allows you to work three days a week, and use the other two days for other endeavours. This has been my model ever since – I now have three medical days of work per week, and two days in the studio. It has been a challenge completing all the work for the solo show during just two days per week. It is only recently that my two careers have really intertwined – during the doctors strikes a few years ago, I felt the best way I could express my frustration and support was through my work. I made several pieces emblazoned with the phrase 'Fund Us Let Us Care', a motif that I have continued to use in my work, including in this show.

Where is your studio? Is its location significant to your practice?

I share a garden studio with my wife, who is a painter, but has also strayed into ceramics. We share a workspace and a kiln, and the studio is always a sacred space detached from the house, free of toddlers and dogs. The location of the studio has definitely been significant for me during the making of this show. Ceramics doesn't wait for you – if the piece gets too dry to do what you want to with it there is very little you can do. Therefore it has been vital to be able to dash down to the studio for evening sessions at critical times when making very large pieces such as the knights' tombs which each took a month to make. I always feel a sense of excitement when entering the studio, like anything is possible when I walk through the doors.

You often draw on medieval imagery – knights, castles, goblets, chalices – where does this interest come from and how does it feed into your work? The way you play with these motifs alongside medical themes and messages (a goblet filled with pills, say, or fleur-de-lis-covered plate inscribed with the message "FUND US LET US CARE") I find really intriguing and moving, but playful, too. Your work has a sense of humour, but seems to ask important questions.

I have always loved medieval art. Growing up near the National Gallery in London stirred my enthusiasm for feudal art and knights in armour in paintings like those of Uccello. More recently, I read Don Quixote a few years ago, and again this reignited my passion for heraldic and feudal art. I love the idea of each family having their own crest, which they wear with pride into battle and carve into stone. I also find it fascinating that these emblems that had so much meaning and cast fear into people are now simply symbols, with their meanings long forgotten. I have included similar symbols in my exhibition work, such as blood test results that would make a doctor wince, but would be meaningless to the non-medical eye. My work definitely has a lot of humour in it, which I think is crucial, but also carries a strong message, which I mentioned previously. This sense of humour in the work is inspired by my love of artists such as Picasso and Grayson Perry, from whom I learnt how to tell a story using ceramics.

Describe your process. Do you sketch your ceramic pieces first, or is making more intuitive for you? 

Generally I launch into sculptures without sketching first, unless the piece is particularly complex, in which case I will reluctantly do some working out in pencil and paper first. I now keep a sketchbook for this, which is a fairly new addition, but I enjoy the continuity of ideas, and being able to flick back to forgotten influences and thoughts.

What books would we find on your bedside table?

I have recently been reading George Orwell's Road to Wigan Pier, a really interesting insight into a bygone era. I love his vivid descriptions, such as coal miners having 'buttons up their back' – scabs over each vertebrae where their bare backs scrape the low ceilings of the coal mine. I am also still trying to finish Don Quixote...

What do you particularly enjoy about working with clay?

What excites me is the ability to make absolutely anything in clay – you can bend it to your will in so many ways. I also love the ability to enhance pieces with underglazes and glazes, and even with different clays, there are so many variables to choose from. I stick to quite a small range of these, but even within that there is a lot to explore. I have no patience for stone or wood carving, I did a course once carving a head. After weeks of carving the same block seemingly without any change in its appearance, my overriding thought was how much quicker I could have made the same piece in clay.

You paint, draw and make mobiles too – tell us about this aspect of your work.

I went through a phase a few years ago of making monoprinted bird mobiles, culminating eventually in a life-size albatross mobile which hangs in our living room at home. Unfortunately clay has taken up most of my time recently, but I would like to return to monoprinting and etching, perhaps after this show has died down. I have an obsession with mark making, and all of these media lend themselves well to this.

Your favourite flower, song, colour?

Favourite flower is a cabbage rose as I always buy them for my wife whenever I see them, although the house does quickly start smelling of cabbages. My favourite song of the moment is Birthday Suit by Cosmo Sheldrake. Favourite colour probably Delft blue which gets used no end in my work.

What's inspiring you in particular right now?

My recent obsession has been religious votives. I have dragged my family around various churches and cathedrals to look at the silver votive collections, as well as knight effigies. I also love medieval pilgrim badges, often made of pewter or tin, that pilgrims would receive having visited a religious site. These have been an endless source of inspiration for me for several pieces in my show. I would like to make more of these in the future.

Tell us about your upcoming projects.

The main thing on my mind currently is my solo show which opened on 22nd January. This is my first solo show in my home city, which makes it that much more special. I hope that some exciting projects come out of this exhibition.