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London
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. —Edmund de Waal 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, catalyzing his interest in bridging Chinese and Japanese ceramic traditions with medieval English techniques. De Waal received 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 “cargoes” of irregular porcelain vessels became central to his work, fluctuating in scale and breadth over the years. One of de Waal’s first major architectural interventions was The Porcelain Room (2002) 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.
