Edmund de Waal

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Edmund Arthur Lowndes de Waal is a British ceramic artist. He has worked as a curator, linguist, lecturer, art critic and art historian and is a Professor of Ceramics at the University of Westminster. He has received several awards and honours for his work.

De Waal was born in 1964 in Nottingham, England,^[1] the son of Rev. Dr Victor de Waal, a Dean of Canterbury Cathedral. He was educated at The King's School, Canterbury, and in 1985 was awarded a scholarship^[2] to read English at Trinity Hall, Cambridge.

At he age of five, de Waal asked his father to take him to an evening class to learn how to make pots.^[3] At The King's School he was taught pottery by the potter Geoffrey Whiting, a disciple of Bernard Leach.^[4] De Waal later worked for Whiting, learning to make large numbers of identical pots by throwing on the potter's wheel. He told BBC radio interviewer John Tusa, "It’s a bit like doing scales as well – you’d never be surprised by a musician spending five years doing arpeggios, and there is a sense in a ceramic apprenticeship that that’s really what you’re doing." De Waal decided at school that he wanted to be a rural potter in Leach's Anglo-Oriental style, making inexpensive domestic pottery in subdued colours.^[3] On graduating from Cambridge he set up a pottery on the Welsh border. He studied Japanese at Sheffield University^[1] and was awarded a Daiwa Anglo-Japanese Scholarship, working at the Mejiro Ceramics Studio in Tokyo.

His work remained broadly within the Anglo-Oriental tradition but he also studied the modernists, and the Bauhaus movement in particular. Reading Leach's papers and making a direct study of Japanese folk art led him to distance himself from some of Leach's views in a monograph that he has described as "the first 'de-mystifying' study of Leach."^[5] "The great myth of Leach," he said, "is that Leach is the great interlocutor for Japan and the East, the person who understood the East, who explained it to us all, brought out the mystery of the East. But in fact the people he was spending time with, and talking to, were very few, highly educated, often Western educated Japanese people, who in themselves had no particular contact with rural, unlettered Japan of peasant craftsman."^[3] He noted that Leach did not speak Japanese and had looked at only a narrow range of Japanese ceramics. These opinions attracted criticism from some of Leach's followers.

In visits to gothic cathedrals as a child de Waal had attended to small spaces within large buildings. While at university he began to consider how his work might help to re-order the interior space of the museums and art galleries he visited. In his current work he has moved away from making single objects to the production of groups of objects to be viewed in relation to openings and spaces. Most of his work consists of cylindrical porcelain pots with pale celadon glazes. He believes that the East and West may meet in porcelain; for example, that there the ethos of China's medieval Sung Dynasty may encounter the modernist ethos of the Bauhaus.^[6]

De Waal works and lives in London, where he shares a studio with the potter Julian Stair and his studio manager, Marie Torbensdatter Hermann.

[edit] Awards and honours

• 2003 Silver Medal, World Ceramic Exposition, Korea
• 2000-2002 Leverhulme Special Research Fellowship
• 1998 British Council Award
• 1996 London Arts Board Individual Artists Award
• 1996 Fellow of Royal Society of Arts
• 1991-1993 Daiwa Anglo-Japanese Foundation Scholarship

[edit] References

[edit] Sources

• Twentieth Century Ceramics, Thames and Hudson, 2003
• De Waal's website
• Ceramics: Art and Perception, No. 54. 2003