Edmund de Waal

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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 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.

Thinking of the crafting and placement of ceramic vessels as a form of poetry, de Waal has continued to transform spaces with his objects. Signs & Wonders (2009) at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, saw 425 glazed porcelain vessels positioned on a red shelf along the inner ledge of the museum’s uppermost cupola—a love letter of sorts to the museum’s collection and a celebration of its new ceramics galleries. In 2019, the exhibition elective affinities juxtaposed de Waal’s vessels with illustrious works from the Frick Collection, New York.

De Waal’s sculptural practice, writing and art historical research are deeply intertwined, as he works across mediums and collaborates with museums, poets, performers, musicians and other visual artists, both living and deceased. During the Night at the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna, de Waal’s 2016 exhibition inspired by a drawing of a nightmare by Albrecht Dürer, was the product of three years of research into the museum’s collection, during which he studied such remarkable objects as sixteenth-century corals and paintings by Lucas Cranach the Elder.

In 2018, de Waal collaborated with choreographer Wayne McGregor, designing the set for McGregor’s new ballet, Yugen, performed at London’s Royal Opera House. That same year he worked with composer Simon Fisher Turner on an exhibition titled –one way or other– at the Schindler House in West Hollywood, California.

To coincide with the 58th Biennale di Venezia the following year, de Waal presented psalm—a two-part exhibition at the Museo Ebraico and the Ateneo Veneto that reflected upon Venice’s literary and musical heritage. The library of exile (2019), a pavilion built within the Ateneo Veneto, brought together two thousand books, most in translation, by exiled writers from Ovid’s time to the present day. Following its presentation in Venice, the project traveled to the Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden, Germany, in 2020, and then to the British Museum, London. In 2021 the books were donated to the University of Mosul library in Iraq, which was destroyed in 2015.

An acclaimed writer himself, 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.

Letters to Camondo, published in April 2021, is de Waal’s haunting sequence of imagined letters to the historical figure Count Moïse de Camondo (1860–1935)—the owner of a Parisian mansion filled with beautiful objects, which he turned into a memorial for his lost son. The mansion has since become the Musée Nissim de Camondo, which has remained unchanged since 1936. Through detailed explorations of the museum’s archives and collections, the letters and an accompanying exhibition uncover new layers of the family story.

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.

Photo: Tom Jamieson