Could ceramics be satanic? Edmund de Waal’s obsession with the Dane is deeply disturbing | Art and design

pOtter and writer Edmund de Waal, a dark silhouette of smart business clothes against the stark white of his studio, is bursting with ideas, all of them dripping from him at once. He took me on a tour of a former arms factory in an industrial area of ​​London, gently tuning in to the architectural calm. He has workstations for his employees (they’re quite functional); Store rooms and the main space were almost empty except for some giant black-lidded vessels he had made in Denmark, which were as wide as coffins. At both ends, there are secret sets of steps, places of raw creativity. One, the potter’s wheel, is the place where it is made; The other, with his desk and bookshelves, is where he writes.

He opens a door to the room containing two great kilns, the back wall of which is lined with rows of shelves with experiments in shape and glazing, and tells me of his annoyance when people comment on the absolute order of the whole place. “that it Porcelain“,” he says with emotional emphasis. Dust and dirt are the enemy. He points out that potters “have struggled for hundreds and hundreds of years to keep things clean so they don’t explode in kilns, or they don’t swell or they don’t swell or all the other countless things that can happen.” He says he’s old enough to have taken a kind of potter’s apprenticeship that involved endless sweeping up of clay dust. Dust is the traditional fetching of clay. Potter’s Lung – Condition Chronic, silicosis Clouds of dust surround any attempt at pottery making, if you’re not careful.

Suddenly I was immersed in the memory of his description of the dust-covered ceramic city of Jingdezhen, which he wrote about in his book The White Road, a kind of memoir told through the history of ceramics; Then there is the dust that he writes about in his book Letter to Kamondo, Dust com. shtetl Nearby is the Odessa his family had left as they rose to the wealth and luxury of the Second Empire in the late 19th century, when they must have waged war on the dust amidst “all this operatic nonsense about curtains and draperies and curtains and spoils” with “servants endlessly scanning all those traces that might appear where [they’d] come from “.

He quotes W.G. Sebald: “Ash is a recovered substance, like dust.” It is occupied by dust and ashes: what remains of us. The survival of things beyond man’s fragile life is one of the themes of his extraordinary 2010 bestseller, The Rabbit with Amber Eyes, a family story told through a collection of fairy tales. netsukethe small Japanese ivory sculptures that, through all the violence and genocide of twentieth-century Europe, were acquired, donated, stolen, smuggled to safety, hidden, and recovered.

There is something infectious in his sparse, passionate way of speaking and writing, and perhaps I don’t need much encouragement, because now I’m also thinking about the absolute stability of ceramics, and how paradoxically it is so easy to break and yet, even if broken, it survives as shards or splinters for centuries or even millennia. “You can’t destroy ceramic, you can only break it,” he says.

Making things out of clay has always been deep at the heart of the human story—and he points out that “every culture has mythical beginnings in the squeezing and making of clay.” Although his methodologies had changed, “anyone from 1680 on would have understood this studio, could walk around and pick up materials, look at them, find a kiln, and understand why all these things had gone wrong in interesting ways.” He points to his shelf of ceramic failures and experiments as if he were an alchemist pointing out base metals that have failed to turn into gold.

Alchemy, the idea of ​​transforming one substance into another through black magic, is on his mind: it’s something he associates with the potter Axel Salto (1889-1961), an exhibition he curated for The Hepworth Wakefield. He says he first saw the Dane’s work 30 years ago, and was amazed by the artist’s strange bulging stoneware, which might sprout strange tentacles, or be knotted and knotted like balls. “I thought: I have absolutely no idea what’s going on here. This is unlike anything I’ve ever seen before.” I found it really annoying, and then I became very obsessed with it, and I realized that it was even weirder than I thought it was, and that he wrote so wonderfully and wonderfully about all these pots. He wrote about the devil in ceramics, about fear in ceramics, and he wrote about transformation.

Salto, de Waal says, was fascinated by the Roman writer Ovid’s epic poem Metamorphoses, a work about mythological transformations. “One of the glorious, wonderful, complex things about ceramics is that it carries in its center the image of something that has changed,” says de Waal. “But Axel Salto says it’s not the past, it’s the present. Things are still moving. When you look at ceramics, you see the glaze melting.”

Salto was more than just a potter: he also designed textiles, using repeating patterns – and repetition, in a different way, was another key to the potter’s existence, as she or he cast the same shapes into the clay over a lifetime, measuring their lives in the pots. Salto made printing stamps and wrote a children’s book on how to use them: “By using printing stamps, one can make truly amusing, surprising, and charming pictures,” he wrote. “An imprint, which is not interesting when printed only once, becomes more interesting the second time, when you place a new impression next to the first. This rule always applies to stamps: Repetition is fun.“

One section of the exhibition in Yorkshire will serve as an area where children (if they can fight off the adults) can play with stamps. The idea is to provide a space where young people can “try things out, not for any kind of curricular need, but because being human means discovering what’s going on, physically, with you in the world — which is play,” says de Waal. “Play keeps you alive in the world in a physical way. Stripping toys and crafts from children’s lives is just a disgrace.”

It’s a political point, and there are more “very specific” politics in a much larger exhibit that just opened at several venues in the Huntington, a library, an art museum and the Botanical Gardens in Los Angeles. It takes as its central theme that of ceramics as a migratory material: there is an installation in the Chinese Garden, Black Porcelain Appearing in the Darkness in the Japanese Garden, and a display of 18th-century Meissen paintings, stolen by the Nazis and then reduced to pieces by the British and American bombing of Dresden, and which have now been repaired using Japanese ceramic art. Kintsugiwhich keeps the breaks visible. “I’ve created a new poetry library — 200 poets who have made America their home from different places. So it’s kind of a refuge library.”

De Waal scatters his ideas throughout his studio. It scatters projects in its wake, too. Aside from his exhibitions in Wakefield and Los Angeles, he is about to finish the first draft of his upcoming new book. This novel, like The Rabbit with Amber Eyes, draws on his fascinating family history – the unpublished correspondence between his grandmother and the poet Rainer Maria Rilke, which should be surprising but not at all surprising when one remembers that one of his relatives was one of Proust’s models for Charles Swann.

It’s a crowded place, de Waal’s mind. I asked him about a passage in his book, The White Way, in which he describes suffering from insomnia in China, and trying to send himself to sleep by remembering all the pots he had made, since he started his business, as a poor but idealistic young man in a small studio in the Herefordshire countryside. Can you seriously remember them all? I ask. He nodded. “It’s an obsession,” he says. “It’s an obsessive testing of things, and that goes deeply into an interest in repetition. As in not trying to make the same thing, but trying to reconcile different things.”