Artist 101

1.

"Very very very heavy"

Edmund was born in 1964, the third son of four, into a family of writers and academics. When he was five, the family moved into the vast medieval Chancery of Lincoln Cathedral, where his father was Chancellor. The same year, de Waal asked to be taken to an evening class in pottery. And that was that. He made his first pot which was, as he has said, “Very very very heavy and very very very white.” The joy of the family’s next move, to the Chancery at Canterbury Cathedral where his father had become Dean, was that the Cathedral school, King’s Canterbury, had a resident potter. From the age of twelve, de Waal effectively apprenticed himself to Geoffrey Whiting, spending hours after school in the pottery, sweeping the floor and learning to throw functional pots, immersed in a tradition of Anglo-Oriental pottery reaching back to Bernard Leach.

2.

A Scholarship to Japan

In his twenties, after graduating from Cambridge University, where he continued to make pots on a daily basis, de Waal moved to Herefordshire to set up a rural studio. Here he made functional stoneware brown casseroles in relative seclusion, testing to the limit the ethics and aesthetics of Leach’s ideal of the unknown potter. It was not until 1989, when he moved to Sheffield, that de Waal began to use the porcelain that has become his central material. A scholarship to Japan enabled him to study Japanese and Korean ceramics, to experiment alongside Japanese ceramicists and research what would become, in 1997, his first book, a ground-breaking reassessment of Bernard Leach. In this he unmasked the British artist’s poor understanding of Japanese culture and narrow views about the purposes and values of ceramics. Constantly reading and writing, combining poetry, philosophy and potting, de Waal drew fresh inspiration from many sources, including the potters Lucie Rie and Hans Coper, contemporary artists such as Donald Judd and the glorious masters of Meissen and Sevres. 

3.

Sensual, Minimalist and Functional

With a new sense of possibility and excitement, de Waal returned to London and set up a studio alongside Julian Stair. His repertoire of forms expanded – there were lidded pots, ginger jars, cylindrical bowls and small jugs with no handles but small indentations for a thumb to feel out.  He experimented with celadon glazes, based on his study of Japanese, Korean and Chinese examples, and with a range of oriental seals or marks.

His work became increasingly popular with a sophisticated audience, who were drawn to his beautifully sensual, minimalist and functional ware.  The idea of putting works together in ‘cargoes’ or series began to excite de Waal, and he turned increasingly to modernist architecture for inspiration. In 1999 he was invited to make his first public exhibition, at the modernist High Cross House in Devon, for which he created an entirely new body of work, made in response to the space, and disposed throughout in groups, in direct conversation with the architecture. 

4.

A Porcelain Room

The 2000s saw de Waal’s transformation from a functional potter to an much celebrated artist working almost entirely with groups of pots, gathered in vitrines or purpose built architectural structures, whose evocative titles summoned a hinterland of thought.  As de Waal once said, “as I’ve grown up with making things, the kinds of things I want to say has changed. But as I am a potter, I don’t see why I have to stop making things to say different things.” An exhibition at the Geffrye Museum in east London in 2002, A Porcelain Room, marked a turning point. First invited to co-curate the exhibition, A Secret History of Clay, at Tate Liverpool, in 2004, soon de Waal was invited to make exhibitions and installations across the country, for both private and public patrons, including the Duke of Devonshire, Kettle’s Yard and the Victoria and Albert Museum.

5.

The Hare With Amber Eyes

With the publication of de Waal’s family memoir, The Hare With Amber Eyes in 2010, de Waal’s reputation exploded far beyond the confines of the art world. This profound excavation of painful, hidden family secrets, focused on the fate of a collection of Japanese netsuke which de Waal inherited from a great uncle, was also an exploration of memory and forgetting, of histories of touch and taste, and a feeling out of cataclysms of loss as well as the persistent transmission of culture across eras and geography. It also propelled in de Waal a reconsideration of his own partly Jewish identity and his cultural inheritance. Since then de Waal’s work has moved alongside his writing, increasingly ambitious in scale and a determination to allow porcelain to speak of the most difficult truths. His porcelain room, the Library of Exile, which de Waal displayed from 2019 filled with 2000 volumes written by writers in exile, from Ovid to children’s author Judith Kerr, has been donated to the Warburg Institute, to be incorporated into the redesign of the institute. The books themselves will go to the Mosul University Library in Iraq to help rebuild its collection. For de Waal, porcelain expresses the vulnerability but also the resilience of all human culture. 

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