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The Metamorphic Wonder of Edmund de Waal

In conversation with Observer, the renowned ceramicist and author reflects on slowness, beauty, play and the endless possibilities of an open kiln.

There is slowness embedded in making pots—forming, turning, glazing, firing—that mirrors that of writing books and poetry—phrasing, finding rhythms, meaning-making. It all takes time. Added to this is history, archival material, lineage and the endless search for self. Edmund de Waal has spent a lifetime involved in all of it: pottery, books, poetry and archives. He works with porcelain, translucent and paper-thin, glazed at high temperatures. Out of the kiln, when tapped, each small vessel sounds like a tiny bell. The echo it makes in his gun factory-turned-studio in London, along with some of his favorite music playing while he works, like Bach’s French Suites, is embedded into these delicate vessels, as are the imprints of his hands.

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De Waal has been making pots for 55 years. He’s also a writer. His best-known book is The Hare with Amber Eyes, which won the Costa Book Award, the Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Prize, and the Windham-Campbell Literature Prize. He also wrote The White Road, Letters to Camondo and most recently An Archive; he is finishing another book that will be published in the U.K. in November this year. Exhibitions of his work are currently on at the Huntington Museum in L.A., the Hepworth in Wakefield, England, Prague Castle Riding School and, this August, at the Gana Art Center in Seoul. His work is in museum collections around the world. In our interview, de Waal considered every question, weighing them with lucid answers. He is extremely generous, with a wide-open heart and deep thoughts. We covered so much territory that the interview had to be condensed.

In your conversation with Axel Salto in your book, Playing with Fire, you said that you needed to know first how he paces the world. I’m curious how you pace the world, because you cover so much ground. You’re constantly producing work. You have exhibits, you write books. How do you pace your world?

I think the best way of answering that is the difference between two different recordings of Glenn Gould’s Goldberg Variations. At the beginning, he’s very fast and very involved. And the second late one in 1981, he’s much slower, and he hums along. All the time. My pacing of the world was very, very, very fast for a very long time. And it involved lots of travel and a huge amount of needing to be in so many different places. It was pretty pacey, a sort of Philip Glass pace. Steve Reich in Tehillim had that kind of pacing. I think more latterly that in my writing and in my making; it’s not only slower, but I’m humming along as I do it too. So I’m responding more in the moment to what’s going on. It’s slower; it doesn’t look like it from the outside, but from the inside, it’s definitely a slower pacing.

That’s also a part of aging.

I think there’s something about making decisions and choices about what’s of value. And so fewer projects, slower projects and iterative projects. Returning to things that I feel need to be renewed, reviewed, walked over again. My Archive book was going back and looking again, and picking up on archival, unfinished, contingent scraps of things that I had left by the wayside.

Rereading An Archive, I really appreciated hearing about The Hare with Amber Eyes again. It’s a return for the reader as well, which is lovely.

I’m glad you felt that. One always feels like that could be hubristic.

It wasn’t. Also in The White Road. When I watch videos of you working, I can feel the silkenness of the porcelain and hear the sound like bells.

I wish you could be in the studio with these huge black vessels I’ve made, which you can absolutely thump them and they ring. Do you know that at the end of Tarkovsky’s Andrei Rublev, there’s a great moment of bells that has that kind of extraordinary quality? You can hit them, and they hold sound for a long time. That’s the thing about objects and their reverberation in the world.

The sound of the objects, are they changing for you? You’re doing different things with them.

I am doing different things. I’m on the cusp of things changing. I........

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