‘When I first moved out from under the shadow of Leach I was uneasy about titles; the claiming of names for pots seemed hubristic. Few had done it, and the titles were either grandiose or unbearably effete. But letting a group go without a name seemed shabby, and my two favourite masters of titles, Howard Hodgkin and Lydia Davies, seemed able to name pictures and stories and not close down their meaning. So I started, very cautiously, to name.

A title is a sort of letter of promise in a pocket. Sometimes a title brushes alongside a remembered view of a Dutch interior of a church, or is a conversation overheard, a line from an inventory, a favourite melody, a street. Sometimes it is a provocation: the claiming of a shared space with someone I care about. Sometimes it is a stone thrown in the opposite direction to distract attention. Giving a work a name is the start of letting it go, making a space to start again.’ 1

Edmund de Waal is many things – an artist, a maker, a writer, a thinker, and a storyteller. A distinct feature of much of his work is the titles that accompany them. Few artists are so poetic and for de Waal the titles he chooses offer the viewer another level with which to engage with his work. As the author A.S. Byatt commented ‘his titles do add to and illuminate his work. He uses the idea of language itself as a metaphor for the forms of language.’ 2 Marrying together the aesthetic and intellectual, they encourage us to stand and consider, making us pause and look and think.

‘As I both make pots and write, there is a strong, unstable relationship for me between object and words and storytelling. They do not map each other as experience – I don’t make an installation to enact something I’ve read or written. It is more that they sit near to each other in my life and spill across.’ 3

Today de Waal is as known for his writing as for his ceramics – and his 2010 book The Hare with the Amber Eyes has become an international bestseller, published in more than thirty languages. Having studied English Literature at Cambridge, he developed an interest in writing and storytelling from a young age, and in pillow book de Waal looks to literature in the title that he chooses. A collection of notebooks or anecdotes drawn together over the course of an author’s life, in Japan a ‘pillow book’ is a literary scrapbook of private musings and personal memories, often never intended for publication. The most famous of which, The Pillow Book was completed in the year 1002. Recorded by Sei Shōnagon during her time as an attendant to the Empress Consort Teishi in the Heian-period in Japan, her stories detail the everyday life of court, with fascinating snippets of comment, gossip, and social history.

It’s a fitting title for de Waal’s work, bringing together his interest in East and West on both a literary and artistic level. Indeed much of de Waal’s work explores the idea of a journey and dialogue between East and West – a visual and literary ‘Silk Road’ journey that he began in the 1970s when he visited Japan for the first time. In the 1980s he attended Cambridge University, writing his English thesis on Ezra Pound’s early Imagist translations of Chinese classical poetry and essays on Japanese Noh theatre. His ceramics have always been indebted to the work of Bernard Leach, via his ceramics tutor Geoffrey Whiting. Leach played a pivotal role in bringing a greater understanding of Japanese ceramics to Britain, enrolling the help of the Japanese potter Shoji Hamada who assisting in the building of his first kiln in St Ives in the 1920s. His thrown porcelain works of the mid-1990s began to explore this further with his series of ‘cargoes’ – individually thrown works that he grouped together, suggestive of both an artistic and a physical journey. These later led the artist to explore ideas of cabinets and vitrines in which his porcelain works were shown and displayed, first seen with his 2010 exhibition at London’s Alan Cristea Gallery. As the writer Emma Crichton-Miller commented ‘It was a huge step forward for de Waal to put his pots behind glass, and the shock registers with the viewer. The consequence is alchemical, beyond the apparent simplicity of the art… The vessels seem exalted but also forlorn; preserved in a place of safety but cut off from communication, like historic collections.’ 4 They become a wunderkammer of ‘white gold’, as porcelain was popularly known in Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth century.

In his wall-mounted vitrines, shown at both Alan Cristea and later Gagosian, de Waal looked to Donald Judd’s stacks – series of sculptures that consisted of vertical lines cantilevered from the wall – and filled them with individually thrown porcelain vessels that maintain a dialogue with one another, much like the paintings of Giorgio Morandi or the vessel groups of ceramicist Gwyn Hanssen Piggot. As de Waal commented ‘You can make twenty pots in a row, and by just moving them ever so slightly each of them has a very different resonance, a very different sort of pitch.’ 5 This musical analogy showcases the artist’s great breadth of knowledge and inspiration in his work.

More so than any other artist working with clay de Waal pushes the boundaries of the discipline. Whilst predominantly a potter, he brings glass, metal and gilding into his works embodying them with striking sculptural sensibilities. Indebted to the work of the Austrian-born Lucie Rie and German-born Hans Coper – two leading figures within the field of ceramics in the twentieth century – de Waal has challenged our understanding of what it means to work in the medium of ceramic today. Since Grayson Perry’s 2004 Turner Prize win the lines have blurred further, with makers such as Perry, de Waal, Magdalene Odundo and Jennifer Lee challenging many of the traditional and accepted so-called ‘craft’ norms. De Waal remains committed to the vessel form in its most traditional sense – as seen through his inclusion in the 2017 exhibition Things of Beauty Growing at the Yale Centre for British Art and later the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, and more recently Strange Clay at The Hayward Gallery, London. But his works are richly layered explorations of so much more. Like sedimented layers of ancient kaolin (the key component in the make-up of porcelain) dug from the earth, de Waal’s work transcends the bounds of traditional mediums and materials, and breathes new life into one of the most ancient and universal of artforms.

1 Edmund de Waal, Edmund de Waal, Phaidon Press, London, 2014, p213-4
2 Ibid, p165
3 Ibid, p202
4 Ibis, p78
5 Ibid, p43