Edmund de Waal

Cylinder, circa 2000

Footnotes

Provenance
Acquired directly from the artist by the present owner

An Important Collection of Edmund de Waal
By Emma Crichton-Miller
Arts writer, editor, journalist and contributor to the 2014 Edmund de Waal monograph.

The turn of the millennium marked a decisive shift in the work of the acclaimed potter and writer, Edmund de Waal. Until then, de Waal had become known amongst a growing band of admirers for his mastery of single thrown porcelain vessels fired in a pale blue celadon glaze. Each unique, these represented variations on a range of forms - cylinders, bowls, lidded jars, tea pots, bottles - which owed some of their lineage to ancient Chinese, Japanese and Korean examples and some to the High Modernist tenets of Bauhaus directors Walter Gropius and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. Some of these pots veered more steeply towards abstraction, others were modestly practical. While they might increasingly have been grouped in what de Waal referred to as 'cargoes' at selling exhibitions at Egg in Kinnerton Place, in 1996, London, and the Scottish Gallery, in Edinburgh, in 1998, these were sold individually as items of craft. From 2000 onwards, however, and certainly by 2005, the date of the two leaning vessels in this collection, titled as a single work, 'In a Dark Wood' (lot 56), de Waal's principal preoccupation has been the creation of conceptual art works from assemblies of pots.

This collection of pots (lots 36-58) all made between 2000 and 2005 thus marks a precious and fertile moment in de Waal's career. It was the period when he was beginning to articulate, both in writing and in exhibitions of his and others' work, his growing interest not so much in what a pot might be but what it might express. In 1999 de Waal, who, born in 1964, has been making pots since the age of five, was invited to show his work at High Cross House in Devon. The pioneering Modernist house, designed by the Swiss–American architect William Lescaze and completed in 1932, was commissioned by the noted philanthropist Leonard Elmhirst, founder of the Dartington Hall Trust. This was to be his first public exhibition. But rather than simply exhibiting his pots alongside works from the Trust's collection, de Waal seized the opportunity to use the whole house as a space for an intervention, creating an entirely new body of work in response to its specific architectural qualities. These pots were distinguished by a small square mark, to underline their new purpose and identity, as opposed to the oriental marks the artist had been using and which you can also see here on these later pots. De Waal wrote in the catalogue that the exhibition reflected his own realisation, that the 'real life' of pots is considerably more fluid than the 'functionalism' ascribed to them. That many pots made ostensibly for use actually had more symbolic meanings and that their display was highly charged. Even kitchen cupboards could act as condensed still lives of objects.'

Their primary symbolic function, perhaps, is as vessels. De Waal is an artist committed to the vessel form. He said in an interview in 2004, what happens when you throw a pot, is that "what you're doing is actually, of course, making an inside and an outside simultaneously, which doesn't happen in very many other places in art. You're making a volume in a very short period of time, you're creating an internal space". These internal spaces echo our own intuitive feeling of being containers - explaining the special kinship human beings have felt with vessel forms throughout human history. In the shift we see between 1999 and 2005, however, de Waal's focus on the internal space within the pot enlarged to encompass an interest also in the external spaces between pots and then between pots and the architectural spaces they inhabit. All were capable of being activated to express ideas - from concrete images of cargo ships laden with porcelain from the Far East to the most abstract philosophical, musical or poetic ideas.

This larger focus became explicit in 2002, when de Waal produced an entire Porcelain Room for the Geffrye Museum in east London. Inspired equally by the idea of the ornate Kunstkammer or Cabinets of Curiosities baroque princes built to house their porcelain and other treasures and the minimalist, constructivist art of Donald Judd and Carl André, de Waal created an entire environment. He wrote at the time, "I tried to create an installation in which the pots define the structure of the space. The room pushes at the architectural elements, opens up the walls and the floor and the ceiling and the windows as places for the pots to be".

As he has said, "It was a no-going-back moment. I couldn't return to discrete, domestic pots". So the discrete pots we see here, poised on the cusp between functional domestic ware and symbolic objects to be deployed and understood in a larger conceptual framework, have a particular poignant potency. They are transitional pieces. As if to underline their momentousness, in 2007 the collector acquired at auction the aptly named pair of elongated leaning vessels, 'In a Dark Wood' (lot 56), created in 2005. The title echoes the opening lines of the first canto of Dante's epic poem, The Divine Comedy:

"In the middle of the journey of our life, I came to myself, in a dark wood, where the direct way was lost". For the five years during which these pots were made, de Waal had been in the middle of the journey of his own life, wrestling with the direction his work should take. By 2005, he knew.