Edmund de Waal

Edmund de Waal is a British ceramic artist (potter).

Born in Nottingham, England in 1964, [ collection.britishcouncil.org/html/artist.aspx?id=18077-13k ] he is consideredweasel inline one of the leading British potters of his generation.

He has worked as a curator, a professor, a linguist, and a lecturer. His studies and writings have made him an art critic and an art historian. Openings and spaces are continually studied and reinterpreted in his work.

De Waal was raised in a clerical family who attended church regularly. They lived near a few gothic cathedrals, and visits to them led de Waal to be attracted to small spaces within larger architecture. When he was five, he asked his father to take him to an evening class to learn how to make pots. A small white pot he made was the first he remembers liking. [ www.bbc.co.uk/radio3/johntusainterview/dewaal_transcript.shtml-69k-] From this early age, de Waal was already more attracted to minimalist work than to highly decorated objects.

De Waal then went to secondary school at The King's School, Canterbury. There, Geoffrey Whiting, a disciple of Bernard Leach, taught him pottery. ["Ceramics: Art and Perception", No. 54, 2003.] Whiting worked and taught very much in the Leach tradition, which brought together the East and the West by combining techniques and philosophies from Japan/China, and mediaeval English ceramics. Whiting believed very much in functional ceramics, and he taught de Waal in class and as his apprentice. By repetitively making pots, as a functional potter would, de Waal became more attuned to the slight differences in form. He told a BBC radio interviewer, "it’s a bit like doing scales as well – you’d never be surprised by a musician spending five years doing arpeggios, and there is a sense in a ceramic apprenticeship that that’s really what you’re doing.”

When de Waal left secondary school, he was sure that he wanted to become a potter. He was brought up in a family of readers and writers, and though Edmund was immersed in ceramics he never stopped reading and writing. Edmund is well known for his work with clay, but he is as well known for his writings.

He attended Cambridge University, where he read English at Trinity Hall. [ www.bbc.co.uk/radio3/johntusainterview/dewaal_transcript.shtml-69k- ] While de Waal studied he continued to visit museums and galleries, such as the famous Kettle's Yard. It was in these buildings that he began considering how his work could help re-design an interior space. De Waal was still dedicated to the idea he would someday be a rural potter, and follow the Leach tradition. This meant he would make “appropriate” work, which meant he would make inexpensive domestic pottery with earth-like colours. In Whiting’s words, “Cheap enough to drop, part of everyone’s everyday life”, and this was de Waal's mission statement. [ www.bbc.co.uk/radio3/johntusainterview/dewaal_transcript.shtml-69k- ]

After finishing his studies at Cambridge, he set up a pottery studio in the countryside, on the Welsh border. He continued as an apprentice for a couple of years, and undertook postgraduate studies in Japanese at Sheffield University. [collection.britishcouncil.org/html/artist.aspx?id=18077-13k] He was awarded a Daiwa Anglo-Japanese Scholarship and worked at the Mejiro Ceramics Studio in Tokyo. De Waal was making functional stoneware vessels, and was still very much influenced by the ideas and pots of Leach. Being aware of the “Anglo-Oriental” roots in his own work, he did not aspire to only continue the tradition. He had other influences, such as the work of early modernists and the Bauhaus movement. He had realized he could critique the Leach tradition intellectually while he was in Cambridge, and he began to do so. Leach was a very prolific writer, and potter as well. Leach wrote much of what Edmund had read about pottery and the union of the East and West. De Waal went back to Japan, and during this time he studied the local folk-craft, and the papers and journals of Leach. He noticed Leach had actually not understood Japanese and only looked at certain forms. De Waal was finding “holes” in the studies, philosophies, and writings of Leach. He decided to write about his findings, and this did not go over very well. De Waal found the Leach tradition closes down opportunities for different kinds of work within ceramics, and

“...the great myth of Leach is that Leach is the great interlocutor for Japan and the East, the person who understood the East, who explained it to us all, brought out the mystery of the East. But in fact the people he was spending time with, and talking to, were very few, highly educated, often Western educated Japanese people, who in themselves had no particular contact with rural, unlettered Japan of peasant craftsman.”

[ www.bbc.co.uk/radio3/johntusainterview/dewaal_transcript.shtml-69k- ] These findings, and his writings gained him much criticism, as young Edmund had grown up within the Leach tradition.

De Waal’s current work has moved away from single objects, and is more concerned with openings and spaces. He now works solely in high-fire porcelain, with celadon glazes. He believes porcelain is the matrix for the East and West, the Sung Dynasty, and the Bauhaus. [ Twentieth Century Ceramics, Thames and Hudson, 2003.] Though there is much history to these colours and materials his work has an undeniable contemporary look and feel. By making large numbers of classic cylindrical and circular shapes, and using clean celadon glazes, De Waal’s work is very recognizable. This work has gained much international recognition, including the following awards:

**2003 Silver Medal, World Ceramic Exposition, Korea
**2000-2002 Leverhulme Special Research Fellowship
**1998 British Council Award
**1996 London Arts Board Individual Artists Award
**1996 Fellow of Royal Society of Arts
**1991-1993 Daiwa Anglo-Japanese Foundation Scholarship
**1985 Trinity Hall, Cambridge Scholarship [ www.edmunddewaal.com ]

De Waal’s style has been labelled the height of minimalist chic, but his work speaks about more than just the forms and glazes. He experiments with how objects change a particular space, how they communicate with each other, and how much a viewer needs even to see of a pot for it to have an impact upon its surroundings. When asked if he felt his exploration of ceramics had become narrow with his choice of one type of clay and one type of glaze, he responded, “I don’t think it’s narrow in the slightest. I think you can find breadth wherever you are.” [ www.bbc.co.uk/radio3/johntusainterview/dewaal_transcript.shtml-69k- ]

De Waal currently works and lives in London, where he shares a studio with Julian Stair and his studio manager, Marie Torbensdatter Hermann. He teaches at the University of Westminster. His current artists statement is as follows:For the last eight years I have also been making installation groups. I called them ‘cargoes’ of pots, an image that came from the images of sunken cargoes of porcelain.

There are few images of groups of porcelain – we are much more used to seeing single pieces in isolated splendour – and this has haunted me. Some of these installations were for Modernist houses as with my work at High Cross House in 1999. Some were for austere art galleries – as with the Porcelain Room made for the Geffrye Museum, 2002-2003 and shown at the Kunstindustri Museum in Copenhagen in 2004. For my solo show at Roche Court in 2004 I made three installations that respond to the Arcadian landscape in which the gallery sits. This focus on installation has allowed me to be ambitious in making pots that challenge architectural space. My installation groups focus on the ways in which subtle modulations are manifested through repetition.

Recent projects at Blackwell, the Lake District mansion designed by Baillie Scott, and the National Museum Cardiff in Wales, have extended this practice.

Much of my recent work explores colour through hidden interstices and openings. These pieces look at how colour change through shadow.

All these pots were made in porcelain as I believe that it is the porcelain that is the matrix for East and West, the sung dynasty and the Bauhaus.

It remains to be a powerfully contemporary medium. [ www.edmunddewaal.com ]

ources

*Twentieth Century Ceramics, Thames and Hudson, 2003
*www.bbc.co.uk/radio3/johntusainterview/dewaal_transcript.shtml-69k-
*www.edmunddewaal.com
*collection.britishcouncil.org/html/artist.aspx?id=18077-13k
*Ceramics: Art and Perception, No. 54. 2003