Edmund de Waal
Encyclopedia
Edmund Arthur Lowndes de Waal OBE
(born 1964) is a British
ceramic artist
, and author of The Hare with Amber Eyes
(2010). He has worked as a curator
, lecturer, art critic
and art historian and is a Professor of Ceramics at the University of Westminster
. He has received several awards and honours for his work.
, England
, the son of Rev. Dr Victor de Waal, later Dean
of Canterbury Cathedral
.
De Waal made his first pot at the age of five after persuading his father to take him to a ceramics evening class.. He was educated at The King's School, Canterbury
, where he was taught pottery by the potter Geoffrey Whiting, a disciple of Bernard Leach
. . Aged 17, de Waal obtained a place at Cambridge University and deferred entry to take up a two-year apprenticeship with Whiting. During the apprenticeship he repetitively made hundreds of pots, such as casseroles and honey pots, telling BBC radio interviewer John Tusa
, "It’s a bit like doing scales as well – you’d never be surprised by a musician spending five years doing arpeggios, and there is a sense in a ceramic apprenticeship that that’s really what you’re doing."
In 1983, de Waal took up his place at Trinity Hall
, Cambridge to read English, being awarded a scholarship in 1985 and graduating in 1986 with first class honours.
Following graduation de Waal followed the path he had decided upon before going up to Cambridge: to make inexpensive domestic pots with good earth colours. He moved to the Welsh borders where he built a kiln and set up a pottery making functional stoneware pots in the Leach tradition, but the enterprise was not successful. He moved to inner-city Sheffield and started to work with porcelain, describing it as “the great taboo material; it doesn't do any of the 'proper' work of a pot. In using it I was trying to find a way out." .
In 1991 he obtained a Daiwa Anglo-Japanese Foundation Scholarship, under which he spent a year obtaining a post-graduate diploma in Japanese language at Sheffield University and then another year continuing his study of the language in Japan. Whilst in Japan he also worked on a monograph of Bernard Leach, researching Leach’s papers and journals in the archive room of the Japanese Folk Crafts Museum
, and continued to make pots, porcelain jars with the pushed-in, gestural sides that were to epitomise his style.
De Waal's book on Bernard Leach was published in 1998. He described it as "the first 'de-mystifying' study of Leach." "The great myth of Leach," he said, "is that Leach is the great interlocutor for Japan and the East, the person who understood the East, who explained it to us all, brought out the mystery of the East. But in fact the people he was spending time with, and talking to, were very few, highly educated, often Western educated Japanese people, who in themselves had no particular contact with rural, unlettered Japan of peasant craftsman." He noted that Leach did not speak Japanese and had looked at only a narrow range of Japanese ceramics. These opinions attracted criticism from some of Leach's followers.
His work remained broadly within the Anglo-Oriental tradition but he also studied the modernists
, and the Bauhaus
movement in particular. In visits to gothic
cathedral
s as a child de Waal had attended to small spaces within large buildings. While at university he began to consider how his work might help to re-order the interior space of the museums and art galleries he visited. In his current work he has moved away from making single objects to the production of groups of objects to be viewed in relation to openings and spaces. Most of his work consists of cylindrical porcelain
pots with pale celadon
glazes. He believes that the East and West may meet in porcelain; for example, that there the ethos of China's medieval Sung Dynasty may encounter the modernist ethos of the Bauhaus.
In 2010 his family memoir The Hare with Amber Eyes: a Hidden Inheritance was published by Chatto & Windus in the UK and Farrer, Straus and Giroux in New York. In it he tells the story of his relatives, the once wealthy Ephrussi family
, through the history of a collection of Japanese netsuke
sculptures that are handed down through the generations. It received critical acclaim including the Costa Book Award (Biography 2010) and Ondaatje Prize
(2011).
De Waal, who has made installations for Chatsworth
, Kettle's Yard
, Tate Britain
and the Victoria and Albert Museum
, works and lives in London. He is represented by the Alan Cristea Gallery
, London and the New Art Centre, Wiltshire. He was appointed Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in the 2011 Birthday Honours
for services to art.
In October 2011, de Waal was asked to choose and describe music that inspires him in his work. Speaking about music he described how "you can get yourself into the loops of music... I did a huge porcelain wall - 500 porcelain vessels - and there are rhythms in that wall that completely come out of baroque music. More recently there’s installations where things are in very minimalist, black lead-lined boxes, 12 of them in a row with the same number of vessels in each but they're arranged in different ways. That’s the porcelain equivalent of Steve Reich
's systems music! It’s the same notes and the same tones repeated and just slightly different each time and it only makes sense if you’ve got all of it. One of them by itself is just a black box with a few pots in it." The playlist includes Keith Jarrett
, Johann Sebastian Bach
, John Adams
and Franz Schubert
.
Order of the British Empire
The Most Excellent Order of the British Empire is an order of chivalry established on 4 June 1917 by George V of the United Kingdom. The Order comprises five classes in civil and military divisions...
(born 1964) is a British
United Kingdom
The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern IrelandIn the United Kingdom and Dependencies, other languages have been officially recognised as legitimate autochthonous languages under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages...
ceramic artist
Studio pottery
Studio pottery is made by modern artists working alone or in small groups, producing unique items of pottery in small quantities, typically with all stages of manufacture carried out by one individual. Much studio pottery is tableware or cookware but an increasing number of studio potters produce...
, and author of The Hare with Amber Eyes
The Hare with Amber Eyes
The Hare with Amber Eyes is a family memoir by British ceramicist Edmund de Waal. Waal tells the story of his family the Ephrussi, who were once a very wealthy European Jewish banking dynasty centered in Odessa, Vienna and Paris, peers of the Rothschild family. The Ephrussi lost almost everything...
(2010). He has worked as a curator
Curator
A curator is a manager or overseer. Traditionally, a curator or keeper of a cultural heritage institution is a content specialist responsible for an institution's collections and involved with the interpretation of heritage material...
, lecturer, art critic
Art critic
An art critic is a person who specializes in evaluating art. Their written critiques, or reviews, are published in newspapers, magazines, books and on web sites...
and art historian and is a Professor of Ceramics at the University of Westminster
University of Westminster
The University of Westminster is a public research university located in London, United Kingdom. Its origins go back to the foundation of the Royal Polytechnic Institution in 1838, and it was awarded university status in 1992.The university's headquarters and original campus are based on Regent...
. He has received several awards and honours for his work.
Life
De Waal was born in NottinghamNottingham
Nottingham is a city and unitary authority in the East Midlands of England. It is located in the ceremonial county of Nottinghamshire and represents one of eight members of the English Core Cities Group...
, England
England
England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Scotland to the north and Wales to the west; the Irish Sea is to the north west, the Celtic Sea to the south west, with the North Sea to the east and the English Channel to the south separating it from continental...
, the son of Rev. Dr Victor de Waal, later Dean
Dean (religion)
A dean, in a church context, is a cleric holding certain positions of authority within a religious hierarchy. The title is used mainly in the Anglican Communion and the Roman Catholic Church.-Anglican Communion:...
of Canterbury Cathedral
Canterbury Cathedral
Canterbury Cathedral in Canterbury, Kent, is one of the oldest and most famous Christian structures in England and forms part of a World Heritage Site....
.
De Waal made his first pot at the age of five after persuading his father to take him to a ceramics evening class.. He was educated at The King's School, Canterbury
The King's School, Canterbury
The King's School is a British co-educational independent school for both day and boarding pupils in the historic English cathedral city of Canterbury in Kent. It is a member of the Headmasters' and Headmistresses' Conference and the Eton Group....
, where he was taught pottery by the potter Geoffrey Whiting, a disciple of Bernard Leach
Bernard Leach
Bernard Howell Leach, CBE, CH , was a British studio potter and art teacher. He is regarded as the "Father of British studio pottery"-Biography:...
. . Aged 17, de Waal obtained a place at Cambridge University and deferred entry to take up a two-year apprenticeship with Whiting. During the apprenticeship he repetitively made hundreds of pots, such as casseroles and honey pots, telling BBC radio interviewer John Tusa
John Tusa
Sir John Tusa is a British arts administrator, and radio and television journalist. From 1980 to 1986 he was a main presenter of BBC 2's Newsnight programme. From 1995 until 2007 he was managing director of the City of London's Barbican Arts Centre...
, "It’s a bit like doing scales as well – you’d never be surprised by a musician spending five years doing arpeggios, and there is a sense in a ceramic apprenticeship that that’s really what you’re doing."
In 1983, de Waal took up his place at Trinity Hall
Trinity Hall, Cambridge
Trinity Hall is a constituent college of the University of Cambridge, England. It is the fifth-oldest college of the university, having been founded in 1350 by William Bateman, Bishop of Norwich.- Foundation :...
, Cambridge to read English, being awarded a scholarship in 1985 and graduating in 1986 with first class honours.
Following graduation de Waal followed the path he had decided upon before going up to Cambridge: to make inexpensive domestic pots with good earth colours. He moved to the Welsh borders where he built a kiln and set up a pottery making functional stoneware pots in the Leach tradition, but the enterprise was not successful. He moved to inner-city Sheffield and started to work with porcelain, describing it as “the great taboo material; it doesn't do any of the 'proper' work of a pot. In using it I was trying to find a way out." .
In 1991 he obtained a Daiwa Anglo-Japanese Foundation Scholarship, under which he spent a year obtaining a post-graduate diploma in Japanese language at Sheffield University and then another year continuing his study of the language in Japan. Whilst in Japan he also worked on a monograph of Bernard Leach, researching Leach’s papers and journals in the archive room of the Japanese Folk Crafts Museum
Japanese Folk Crafts Museum
The Japanese Folk Crafts Museum is a museum in Tokyo, dedicated to the hand-crafted art of ordinary people .It was established in 1936 by Yanagi Sōetsu, the founder of the mingei movement....
, and continued to make pots, porcelain jars with the pushed-in, gestural sides that were to epitomise his style.
Work
On returning to Britain in 1993, de Waal began living in London and made his distinctive ceramics, porcelain with a celadon glaze. Their shapes were essentially classical but with indentations or pinches and subtle variations in tone and texture. The pots became very fashionable, and in 1995 he had his first of many solo exhibitions.De Waal's book on Bernard Leach was published in 1998. He described it as "the first 'de-mystifying' study of Leach." "The great myth of Leach," he said, "is that Leach is the great interlocutor for Japan and the East, the person who understood the East, who explained it to us all, brought out the mystery of the East. But in fact the people he was spending time with, and talking to, were very few, highly educated, often Western educated Japanese people, who in themselves had no particular contact with rural, unlettered Japan of peasant craftsman." He noted that Leach did not speak Japanese and had looked at only a narrow range of Japanese ceramics. These opinions attracted criticism from some of Leach's followers.
His work remained broadly within the Anglo-Oriental tradition but he also studied the modernists
Modernism
Modernism, in its broadest definition, is modern thought, character, or practice. More specifically, the term describes the modernist movement, its set of cultural tendencies and array of associated cultural movements, originally arising from wide-scale and far-reaching changes to Western society...
, and the Bauhaus
Bauhaus
', commonly known simply as Bauhaus, was a school in Germany that combined crafts and the fine arts, and was famous for the approach to design that it publicized and taught. It operated from 1919 to 1933. At that time the German term stood for "School of Building".The Bauhaus school was founded by...
movement in particular. In visits to gothic
Gothic architecture
Gothic architecture is a style of architecture that flourished during the high and late medieval period. It evolved from Romanesque architecture and was succeeded by Renaissance architecture....
cathedral
Cathedral
A cathedral is a Christian church that contains the seat of a bishop...
s as a child de Waal had attended to small spaces within large buildings. While at university he began to consider how his work might help to re-order the interior space of the museums and art galleries he visited. In his current work he has moved away from making single objects to the production of groups of objects to be viewed in relation to openings and spaces. Most of his work consists of cylindrical porcelain
Porcelain
Porcelain is a ceramic material made by heating raw materials, generally including clay in the form of kaolin, in a kiln to temperatures between and...
pots with pale celadon
Celadon
Celadon is a term for ceramics denoting both a type of glaze and a ware of a specific color, also called celadon. This type of ware was invented in ancient China, such as in the Zhejiang province...
glazes. He believes that the East and West may meet in porcelain; for example, that there the ethos of China's medieval Sung Dynasty may encounter the modernist ethos of the Bauhaus.
In 2010 his family memoir The Hare with Amber Eyes: a Hidden Inheritance was published by Chatto & Windus in the UK and Farrer, Straus and Giroux in New York. In it he tells the story of his relatives, the once wealthy Ephrussi family
Ephrussi family
The Ephrussi family were a Jewish banking and oil dynasty who originated in Odessa, Ukraine. The family were elevated to the nobility by the Habsburg emperor. The family controlled large-scale oil resources in the Crimea and the Caucasus. They had made their initial fortune controlling grain...
, through the history of a collection of Japanese netsuke
Netsuke
Netsuke are miniature sculptures that were invented in 17th-century Japan to serve a practical function...
sculptures that are handed down through the generations. It received critical acclaim including the Costa Book Award (Biography 2010) and Ondaatje Prize
Ondaatje Prize
The Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Prize is an annual literary award given by the Royal Society of Literature. The £10,000 award is given for a work of fiction, non-fiction or poetry which evokes the "spirit of a place", and which is written by someone who is a citizen of or who has been...
(2011).
De Waal, who has made installations for Chatsworth
Chatsworth House
Chatsworth House is a stately home in North Derbyshire, England, northeast of Bakewell and west of Chesterfield . It is the seat of the Duke of Devonshire, and has been home to his family, the Cavendish family, since Bess of Hardwick settled at Chatsworth in 1549.Standing on the east bank of the...
, Kettle's Yard
Kettle's Yard
Kettle's Yard is an art gallery and house in Cambridge, England.- History and overview :Kettle's Yard was originally the Cambridge home of Jim Ede and his wife Helen. Moving to Cambridge in 1956, they converted four small cottages into one idiosyncratic house and a place to display Ede's collection...
, Tate Britain
Tate Britain
Tate Britain is an art gallery situated on Millbank in London, and part of the Tate gallery network in Britain, with Tate Modern, Tate Liverpool and Tate St Ives. It is the oldest gallery in the network, opening in 1897. It houses a substantial collection of the works of J. M. W. Turner.-History:It...
and the Victoria and Albert Museum
Victoria and Albert Museum
The Victoria and Albert Museum , set in the Brompton district of The Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea, London, England, is the world's largest museum of decorative arts and design, housing a permanent collection of over 4.5 million objects...
, works and lives in London. He is represented by the Alan Cristea Gallery
Alan Cristea Gallery
Alan Cristea Gallery is a commercial art gallery on London's Cork Street, founded in 1995 by Alan Cristea. It is the largest publisher and distributor of prints in Europe.-History:...
, London and the New Art Centre, Wiltshire. He was appointed Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in the 2011 Birthday Honours
2011 Birthday Honours
The Birthday Honours 2011 for the Commonwealth Realms were announced on 7 June 2011 in New Zealand and 11 June 2011 in United Kingdom to celebrate the Queen's Birthday of 2011.-Privy Councillors:...
for services to art.
In October 2011, de Waal was asked to choose and describe music that inspires him in his work. Speaking about music he described how "you can get yourself into the loops of music... I did a huge porcelain wall - 500 porcelain vessels - and there are rhythms in that wall that completely come out of baroque music. More recently there’s installations where things are in very minimalist, black lead-lined boxes, 12 of them in a row with the same number of vessels in each but they're arranged in different ways. That’s the porcelain equivalent of Steve Reich
Steve Reich
Stephen Michael "Steve" Reich is an American composer who together with La Monte Young, Terry Riley, and Philip Glass is a pioneering composer of minimal music...
's systems music! It’s the same notes and the same tones repeated and just slightly different each time and it only makes sense if you’ve got all of it. One of them by itself is just a black box with a few pots in it." The playlist includes Keith Jarrett
Keith Jarrett
Keith Jarrett is an American pianist and composer who performs both jazz and classical music.Jarrett started his career with Art Blakey, moving on to play with Charles Lloyd and Miles Davis. Since the early 1970s he has enjoyed a great deal of success in jazz, jazz fusion, and classical music; as...
, Johann Sebastian Bach
Johann Sebastian Bach
Johann Sebastian Bach was a German composer, organist, harpsichordist, violist, and violinist whose sacred and secular works for choir, orchestra, and solo instruments drew together the strands of the Baroque period and brought it to its ultimate maturity...
, John Adams
John Adams
John Adams was an American lawyer, statesman, diplomat and political theorist. A leading champion of independence in 1776, he was the second President of the United States...
and Franz Schubert
Franz Schubert
Franz Peter Schubert was an Austrian composer.Although he died at an early age, Schubert was tremendously prolific. He wrote some 600 Lieder, nine symphonies , liturgical music, operas, some incidental music, and a large body of chamber and solo piano music...
.
Awards and honours
- 2011 Ondaatje PrizeOndaatje PrizeThe Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Prize is an annual literary award given by the Royal Society of Literature. The £10,000 award is given for a work of fiction, non-fiction or poetry which evokes the "spirit of a place", and which is written by someone who is a citizen of or who has been...
, winner, The Hare with Amber EyesThe Hare with Amber EyesThe Hare with Amber Eyes is a family memoir by British ceramicist Edmund de Waal. Waal tells the story of his family the Ephrussi, who were once a very wealthy European Jewish banking dynasty centered in Odessa, Vienna and Paris, peers of the Rothschild family. The Ephrussi lost almost everything... - 2011 JQ Wingate Prize, shortlist, The Hare with Amber EyesThe Hare with Amber EyesThe Hare with Amber Eyes is a family memoir by British ceramicist Edmund de Waal. Waal tells the story of his family the Ephrussi, who were once a very wealthy European Jewish banking dynasty centered in Odessa, Vienna and Paris, peers of the Rothschild family. The Ephrussi lost almost everything...
- 2010 Costa Book AwardsCosta Book AwardsThe Costa Book Awards are a series of literary awards given to books by authors based in Great Britain and Ireland. They were known as the Whitbread Book Awards until 2005, after which Costa Coffee, a subsidiary of Whitbread, took over sponsorship....
, winner (Biography), The Hare with Amber EyesThe Hare with Amber EyesThe Hare with Amber Eyes is a family memoir by British ceramicist Edmund de Waal. Waal tells the story of his family the Ephrussi, who were once a very wealthy European Jewish banking dynasty centered in Odessa, Vienna and Paris, peers of the Rothschild family. The Ephrussi lost almost everything... - 2003 Silver Medal, World Ceramic Exposition, Korea
- 2000-2002 Leverhulme Special Research Fellowship
- 1998 British CouncilBritish CouncilThe British Council is a United Kingdom-based organisation specialising in international educational and cultural opportunities. It is registered as a charity both in England and Wales, and in Scotland...
Award - 1996 London Arts Board Individual Artists Award
- 1996 Fellow of Royal Society of ArtsRoyal Society of ArtsThe Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufacturers and Commerce is a British multi-disciplinary institution, based in London. The name Royal Society of Arts is frequently used for brevity...
- 1991-1993 Daiwa Anglo-Japanese Foundation Scholarship
Sources
- Twentieth Century Ceramics, Thames and Hudson, 2003
- De Waal's website
- Ceramics: Art and Perception, No. 54. 2003
- The Hare with Amber Eyes: a Hidden Inheritance, Chatto & Windus in the UK and Farrer, Straus and Giroux in New York, 2010