Potter and writer Edmund de Waal, a dark silhouette of neat workwear against the blinding white of his studio, is erupting with thoughts, all of them tumbling out of him at once. He is giving me a tour of the former gun factory on a London industrial estate gently disciplined into architectural calm. It has work stations for his staff (it’s quite an operation); store rooms; and a main space nearly empty but for some giant black lidded vessels he made in Denmark, as capacious as coffins. At either end, up discreet sets of steps, are the places of raw creation. One, with its potter’s wheel, is where he makes; the other, with its desk and bookshelves, is where he writes.
He opens a door to the room housing his two mighty kilns, its back wall lined with rows of shelves with experiments in form and glaze, and tells me of his irritation when people comment on the sheer tidiness of the whole place. “It’s porcelain,” he says with passionate emphasis. Dust and dirt are the enemy. Potters, he points out, “have struggled for hundreds and hundreds of years to keep things clean so that they don’t blow up in kilns, or don’t bloat or don’t dunt or all the other myriad things that can happen”. He is old enough, he says, to have had the kind of potter’s apprenticeship that involved the endless sweeping up of clay dust. Dust is the traditional bringer of potter’s lung – the chronic condition, silicosis. Clouds of dust surround any pottery-making endeavour, if you’re not careful.
Anyone from 1680 onwards would have understood my studio
Suddenly I’m deep in the memory of his descriptions of the dust-blown ceramics-manufacturing city of Jingdezhen, which he wrote about in The White Road, a kind of memoir told through the history of porcelain; and then there is the dust he writes about in his book Letter to Camondo, the dust of the shtetl near Odesa which his family left when they rose into wealth and Second Empire luxury in the late 19th century, when amid “all that operatic nonsense around curtains and blinds and pelmets and trailing swags” they must have waged war on dust, with “servants to endlessly sweep away all those traces that might show where [they’d] come from”.
He quotes WG Sebald: “Ash is a redeemed substance, like dust.” Dust and ashes preoccupy him: the matter that is left of us. The survival of things beyond the fragile lifespan of people is one of the subjects of his extraordinary 2010 bestseller, The Hare With the Amber Eyes, a family story told through a set of netsuke, tiny Japanese ivory carvings that, through all the violence and genocide of 20th-century Europe, were acquired, given away, stolen, smuggled to safety, hidden and retrieved.
Spotless … de Waal has to keep his studio office free of dust and dirt. Photograph: Linda Nylind/The Guardian
There’s something about his scattering, passionate way of talking and writing that is infectious, and maybe I don’t need much encouraging, because now I’m thinking, too, about the sheer persistence of ceramics, how they are paradoxically easy to smash and yet, even if broken, survive as shards or fragments for centuries or even millennia. “You can’t destroy ceramics, you can only break them,” he says.
Making things from clay is almost always deep in the heart of the human story – “every culture has mythic beginnings in squeezing clay and making form,” he points out. And though its methodologies have changed, “anyone from 1680 onwards would have understood this studio, could walk around and pick up materials, look at them, find a kiln, understand why all those things are things that have gone wrong in interesting ways.” He points at his shelf of ceramic failures and experiments as if he is an alchemist gesturing at base metals that have failed to turn to gold.
Alchemy, the idea of the transformation of one substance into another through a dark magic, is on his mind: it is something that he associates with the potter Axel Salto (1889-1961), an exhibition on whom he has curated for The Hepworth Wakefield. He first encountered the Dane’s work 30 years ago, he says, and he was amazed by the artist’s strange, bulbous stoneware vessels, which might be sprouting weird tentacles, or be knotty and knobbly like galls. “I thought, ‘I have no idea what’s going on here at all. This is like nothing I’ve seen.’ I found them really disturbing, and then I got pretty obsessed by him, and realised that he was even more peculiar than I thought he was, and that gloriously, amazingly, he had written about all these pots. He wrote about the demonic in ceramics, about fear in ceramics, and he wrote about transformation.”
With printing stamps one can make amusing, astonishing, indeed bewitching pictures
Salto was, says de Waal, fascinated by the Roman writer Ovid’s epic poem Metamorphoses, a work about mythical transformations. “One of the glorious, gorgeous, complicated things about ceramics is that hold, at the centre of them, the image of something having changed,” says de Waal. “But Axel Salto says it’s not in the past, it’s in the present. That things are still moving, when you look at ceramics, you’re seeing the glaze as it melts.”
Salto was more than a ceramicist: he also designed textiles, using repeated patterns – repetition being, in a different way, another key to a potter’s existence, as she or he throws the same shapes in clay over a lifetime, measuring their life in pots. Salto made stamps for printing and wrote a book for children about how to use them: “with printing stamps one can make amusing, astonishing, indeed bewitching pictures,” he wrote. “The imprint, not that interesting when printed only once, becomes more exciting the second time, when you put a new impression next to the first one. This rule always applies to the stamps: repetition is fun.”
A section in the exhibition in Yorkshire is going to be an area in which children (if they manage to fight off the adults) get to play with printing stamps. The idea is to have a space where young people can “just try things out, not for any kind of curriculum needs, but because being a human being is about discovering what happens, bodily, with you in the world – which is play,” says de Waal. “Play makes you alive to the world in a material way. Stripping play and craft from children’s lives is just a disgrace.”
‘Like nothing I’d seen’ … Axel Salto among
his creations. Photograph: Aage Strüwing/© Axel Salto/VISDA
It’s a political point, and there are more “very pointed” politics in a much larger exhibition that has just opened over several venues at the Huntington, a library, art museum and botanical gardens in Los Angeles. It takes as its central idea that of porcelain as a migratory material: there is an installation in the Chinese garden, black porcelain shown in darkness in the Japanese garden, and a display of 18th-century Meissen plates, which were stolen by the Nazis then reduced to pieces by the British and American bombing of Dresden, now repaired using the Japanese art of kintsugi, which keeps the breaks visible. And “I’ve made a new poetry library – of 200 poets who have all made their home in America from different places. So it’s a sort of library of sanctuary.”
De Waal is scattering thoughts all round his studio; he is scattering projects in his wake, too. Aside from his exhibitions in Wakefield and LA, he is close to finishing the first draft of his next new book. This one, like The Hare With the Amber Eyes, draws on his remarkable family history – the unpublished correspondence between his grandmother and the poet Rainer Maria Rilke, which ought to be surprising but is not at all, really, when one remembers that another of his relatives was one of the models for Proust’s Charles Swann.
It is a busy place, de Waal’s brain. I ask him about a passage in his book The White Road, in which he describes being insomniac in China, and trying to send himself to sleep by remembering all the pots he’s ever made, right from when he was starting out, a young man, impoverished but idealistic in a tiny studio in rural Herefordshire. Can you seriously remember them all? I ask. He nods. “It’s obsessional,” he says. “It’s an obsessional testing out of things, and that heads very deeply into being interested in repetition. As in, not trying to make the same thing, but as trying to work out the breath between different things.”
Playing with Fire: Edmund de Waal and Axel Salto is at The Hepworth Wakefield, 22 November to 4 May. The Eight Directions of the Wind is at The Huntington, Los Angeles, until 26 October.
