Edmund de Waal moves beyond craft

Ceramicist Edmund de Waal says his new installations are about ‘protecting something’

Edmund de Waal is one of our leading contemporary potters. His highly collectible porcelain pots, straight-sided and without lips or handles, glazed in apparently infinite, subtle variations of white, cream, grey, blue and yellow, carry within their minimalist forms a freight of thought about the history and the meaning of vessels, and about how and why people have desired and collected them. Through his work, but also as teacher, critic and art historian, de Waal has transformed the public perception of studio ceramics in this country, and has achieved a level of creative ambition, both criticially and in price (prices range from £2,500 to £50,000), far beyond the craft context where he began.

De Waal is also a writer, and words, especially poetry, play a significant part in his art. His forthcoming family memoir, The Hare With Amber Eyes: A Hidden Inheritance reveals a fascinating family history – de Waal’s paternal grandmother was an Ephrussi, one of the vastly wealthy Jewish banking dynasty, whose Vienna-based bank and properties were seized by the Nazis after the Anschluss of 1938. The book is an extended meditation on collections, collecting and the hold objects can have over those who collect them.

It was inspired by de Waal’s inheritance six years ago of 264 netsuke, those intricate knots of skill and expression carved by Japanese craftsmen since the 17th century. A hare, an overripe persimmon, a drunkard, a wine seller, a dragon – this collection of ornate toggles was first put together by de Waal’s ancestor, Charles Ephrussi, an art historian, aesthete and wealthy man-about-town in 1870s Paris, apparently the model for Proust’s Swann in Remembrance of Things Past. These objects, hidden by a loyal maid in her mattress, were almost all that survived when the family’s assets were confiscated.

As de Waal reflects, sitting in the quiet upstairs office of his Tulse Hill, south London, studio: “There are many objects in the world that have no lasting meaning, where the stories have been effaced or erased. But there are objects in peoples’ lives which have a lingering memory of a story or an anecdote or a place or an emotion and those half-remembered resonances are very powerful.”

De Waal, the third of four brothers brought up in a distinctly Anglican clerisy (his father was Chancellor of Lincoln Cathedral and then Dean of Canterbury; his mother is a writer and scholar of Celtic Christianity) was a passionate collector as a child: “My bedroom was full of a huge vitrine.” And, along with his eldest brother: “We had this big archaeological dig; we collected oyster shells and Georgian pennies and clay pipes and Roman fragments and bits of tessellated pavement and 18th-century bottle tops and lots of fossils.” Museums, taxonomies, antiquarian books were a passion. “There must have been Lego, too,” de Waal adds. At the age of four, de Waal started to make pots. “No one else was making. Everyone else was writing. Making was me trying to make a different identity for myself.”

As an adult, collecting has been less central. “I started to collect studio pottery and then I realised that I could not bear to. My making has displaced my collecting.” Over the past decade, however, de Waal has turned his curatorial instincts on his own work. Abandoning the single pot, de Waal now almost exclusively makes collections of pots, placing groups within specially fabricated cabinets or boxes; half-hiding vessels in ceiling-spaces or on jutting plinths far out of reach; lining whole rooms or choreographing displays through entire buildings. Extensive installations at Kettle’s Yard in Cambridge, Mima in Middlesbrough, the New Art Centre at Roche Court, the Arts and Crafts House at Blackwell and Ingleby Gallery, Edinburgh, reached their culmination this year with a significant solo show, From Zero, at Alan Cristea Gallery.

One inspiration behind his own groupings has been the history of ceramic collections. De Waal’s huge commissioned piece for the V&A, “Signs and Wonders” installed last year, is a parade of more than 400 pots, all inspired by the renowned ceramics collections which he has known and studied since childhood.

The installation hangs in a lacquer red metal channel tracking the circumference of the dome above the main entrance of the V&A, an eloquent homage to the love of objects and of collecting which animates the museum. As de Waal explains this expansion of his work: “When I am actually making something, it is completely singular. It stands by itself in the world. And then there is also the other impulse, to bring them together, to look at them together, to edit them out and to move them around and to bring them into this living, breathing collection.”

The latest development for de Waal, inspired partly by the vitrine that holds his netsuke, has been to close one of his display cases with glass. “That piece, ‘Word for Word’, and a companion piece, were about protecting something. The piece came at the end of finishing the book and feeling very vulnerable about objects and about things surviving in the world.” He admits that this is a radical departure: “I flew the flag for objects having a robust existence in the world and being part of everyday life, that that gave things their dynamic and their meaning, and here I am putting them away. Or 70ft up in the air.”

This new sense of fragility extends to entire collections. “Even collections you think of as being intact, codified and curated, safe and secure, end up broken up, looted, given away, smuggled out, chipped, put up for sale. And my kind of fugitive groupings of objects which seem briefly authoritative, I have no doubt they will be displaced, dispersed, but that doesn’t mean that I can’t have this moment of trying to bring them into lyrical existence, knowing that the lyric might be a short lyric.”

The lyric is immaterial, a song carried on a breath. An artist is playing for high stakes when it is no longer the individual things themselves but their orchestration that matters – demanding more both of collectors and of history. A corresponding note of vulnerability is there in all de Waal’s recent work – in the black glazes and lead-lined boxes, in the protective doors and high plinths – and marks definitively his maturing out of “all that jolly up-beat craft movement stuff”.

‘The Hare With Amber Eyes: A Hidden Inheritance’ is published on June 3 (Chatto & Windus)