Edmund de Waal

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. Thinking of the crafting and placement of ceramic vessels as a form of poetry, de Waal has continued to transform spaces with his objects. In 2009, de Waal’s installation Signs & Wonders at the Victoria Albert Museum, London, positioned 425 of his glazed porcelain vessels on a red shelf along the inner ledge of the museum’s uppermost cupola—a love letter of sorts to the museum’s collection and a celebration of its new ceramics galleries. In 2019, the exhibition elective affinities juxtaposed de Waal’s vessels with works from the Frick Collection, New York. De Waal’s sculptural practice, writing, and art historical research are deeply intertwined, as he works across mediums and collaborates with museums, poets, performers, musicians, and other visual artists, both living and deceased. During the Night , an exhibition de Waal curated at the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna, in 2016, was inspired by a drawing of a nightmare by Albrecht Dürer and resulted from three years of research into the museum’s collection. In 2018, de Waal collaborated with choreographer Wayne McGregor to design the set for Yugen , a new ballet performed at London’s Royal Opera House. That same year he worked with composer Simon Fisher Turner on an exhibition titled –one way or other– at the Schindler House in West Hollywood, California. And in 2023, de Waal curated Playing with Fire , a touring exhibition of works by Axel Salto (1889–1961) that began at CLAY Keramikmuseum Danmark, Middelfart, Denmark, with a major new installation by de Waal reflecting on Salto’s enduring influence. To coincide with the 58th Biennale di Venezia in 2019, de Waal presented psalm —a two-part exhibition at the Museo Ebraico and the Ateneo Veneto that reflected upon Venice’s literary and musical heritage. The library of exile (2019), a pavilion built within the Ateneo Veneto, brought together two thousand books, most in translation, by exiled writers from Ovid’s time to the present. The project traveled to the Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden, Germany, in 2020, and then to the British Museum, London. The books were donated in 2021 to the library of University of Mosul in Iraq, which was destroyed in 2015. An acclaimed writer himself, de Waal published his international bestseller The Hare with Amber Eyes: A Hidden Inheritance in 2010. This memoir about loss, diaspora, and the survival of objects won the Costa Book Award for Biography (2010) and the Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Prize (2011) and has been translated into over thirty languages. De Waal was awarded the Windham-Campbell Prize for Nonfiction by Yale University in 2015, and that same year published The White Road: Journey into an Obsession , an intimate history of porcelain told via stories of those profoundly touched by the material. Letters to Camondo, published in 2021, is comprised of de Waal’s imagined letters to the historical figure Count Moïse de Camondo (1860–1935)—the owner of a Parisian mansion filled with beautiful objects. Now the Musée Nissim de Camondo, the mansion has remained unchanged since 1936 as a memorial to his lost son. The letters and accompanying exhibition uncover new layers of the family story. Much of de Waal’s work is concerned with collecting and collections—how objects are kept together, lost, stolen, or dispersed. His ceramics and writing expand upon conceptual and physical dialogues among minimalism, architecture, and sound, imbuing them with a sense of quiet calm. Manifest across de Waal’s practice is a distinct aesthetic philosophy that puts the hand, the sense of touch, and thus the human above all else. His work is about connecting people by reviving and telling stories that matter.