Ceramicist finds love, stories in porcelain
Who can say why an artist finds his voice in a particular medium?
British ceramicist Edmund de Waal fell for white porcelain 25 years ago. Was it because it’s so hard to work with compared to more pedestrian clays?
“That’s a pretty good answer,” he said the other day, on the phone from New York. “Maybe it was a bit of self-defining. Everyone else was cheerfully splashing color everywhere.”
De Waal’s new book, “The White Road: Journey Into an Obsession,” is a poetic and meditative collage of memoir, travelogue and history sprung from a five-year pilgrimage to three “white hills” in China, Germany and England, where porcelain was invented or reinvented.
For 500 years, no one in the West knew how porcelain was made; so of course everyone wanted it, and wanted to know its secrets. De Waal, who works with porcelain from Limoges, France, describes his quest as “a paying of dues to those that have gone before.”
Starting with mountains of discarded shards in the historical production city of Jingdezhen, China, he pieces together a tale that binds the Ancient East, Old World Europe, New World America and the global 20th and 21st centuries. It’s a complicated history, encompassing centuries of tough working conditions and a bit of Adolph Hitler.
But he also wanted to make “a human-grounded story,” and it’s good-humored. “Surely, they couldn’t break this many pots every year?” he wonders as he traces the story of thousands of porcelain multiples ordered by China’s Imperial Court in the 16th century.
Along the way, de Waal also searches for himself.
“The more difficult it is, the more I want to do it,” de Waal said.
The book sings because words are de Waal’s medium, too — a talent first apparent in his 2010 memoir “The Hare With the Amber Eyes,” a surprise international best-seller.
There’s a kind of shaping that goes into making words and sentences, de Waal said.
He’s keenly aware of their visual “sense of weight.” The 66 chapters of “The White Road” are not long narratives. Each unfolds in paragraphs separated by ample white space, creating a rhythmic flow on the page that echoes the way de Waal stores and shows the cylindrical objects he makes.
His signature wood and glass cases contain groupings of demure white porcelain vases, each piece unique and minimalist but with intentionally funky aspects, so you don’t forget they’re from the hands of a human. (Don’t think fussy tableware, like the painted china he calls “passiveaggressive porcelain.”)
De Waal’s vessels are not all the same white, with subtle differences determined by the clay’s source. In his large-scale works, he leaves white space between each cluster of objects, which could be read as lines of poetry or notes on a musical scale.
Sometimes de Waal’s cases have opaque glass that make the objects inside seem blurred. The subtitle of “The White Road” is rendered in blurred type. De Waal can’t take credit for that, but he loves it. “That was a brilliant graphic design solution to making the book work,” he said.
His art commissions have skyrocketed in the past five years, partly driven by the success of “The Hare With Amber Eyes.” And things he writes about are finding their way into his installations.
“You get so much back by finding these stories and trying to shape them,” he said.
De Waal didn’t discover writing by accident. He’s an avid reader who is especially enam- ored of poetry and loves experimental music. Decades of sitting at a potter’s wheel have made him a curious, perceptive thinker.
“It takes you into learning about self-criticism,” he said. Through many hours, weeks and years, he added, “you work through who you are and why you’re doing what you’re doing.” Well, to a point. “Ten thousand things,” one of the book’s chapters, gave de Waal the title for his next exhibition. But he appears to have taken a dark turn. Opening in January at Los Angeles’ Gagosian Gallery, his new show will feature “substantial installations” of allblack pots.
“I don’t know quite what’s going on,” he said.