“I’ve always loved the idea of the mutability of things. . . . Nothing is forever. . . . There’s an inherent instability about how objects work in space.”
In his visual art and literary works, Edmund de Waal HRSA uses objects as vehicles for human narrative, emotion and history. His installations of handmade porcelain vessels, often contained in minimalist structures, investigate themes of diaspora, memory and materiality.
Born in Nottingham, England, de Waal apprenticed with the renowned potter Geoffrey Whiting from 1981 to 1983, an experience that catalysed his interest in bridging Chinese and Japanese ceramic traditions with medieval English techniques. De Waal went on to receive a BA in English Literature from the University of Cambridge in 1986, followed in 1991 by a Daiwa Anglo-Japanese Foundation scholarship, which he used to obtain a postgraduate diploma in Japanese language from the University of Sheffield and to study at the Mejiro Ceramics studio in Tokyo. While in Japan he began writing a monograph on Bernard Leach, the “father” of British studio pottery.
Upon returning to London in 1993, de Waal shifted his focus from stoneware to porcelain and began to experiment with arrangements of objects, such as teapots, bottles and jugs. Groupings or “cargos” of irregular porcelain vessels would become central to his work, fluctuating in scale and breadth over the years. One of de Waal’s first major architectural interventions came in 2002 with The Porcelain Room at the Geffrye Museum (now the Museum of the Home), London, in which he arranged 650 vessels on shelves and within cavities in the floor and ceiling of a chamber illuminated by a porcelain window.
An acclaimed writer, de Waal published his international bestseller The Hare with Amber Eyes: A Hidden Inheritance in 2010. This memoir about loss, diaspora and the survival of objects won the Costa Book Award for Biography (2010) and the Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Prize (2011) and has been translated into over thirty languages. De Waal was awarded the Windham Campbell Prize for nonfiction by Yale University in 2015, and that same year he published The White Road: a pilgrimage of sorts, an intimate history of porcelain told via the stories of those whose lives have been profoundly touched by the material.
Much of de Waal’s work is concerned with collecting and collections—how objects are kept together, lost, stolen or dispersed. His ceramics and writing expand upon conceptual and physical dialogues among minimalism, architecture and sound, imbuing them with a sense of quiet calm. However, their meditative quality is neither neutral nor ambivalent. Manifest across de Waal’s practice is a distinct aesthetic philosophy that puts the hand, touch and thus the human above all else. It is about connecting people by reviving and telling stories that matter.
