In his visual art and literary works Edmund by Waal she uses objects – both of her own creation and of found artifacts – as vehicles for narrative, emotion and story. His installations of porcelain vases contained in minimalist structures reveal the ways in which simple forms serve as repositories of human experience.
De Waal's lifelong fascination with porcelain, or 'white gold', is deeply intertwined with his poetic imagination. Arranged in groups and of various sizes and colors, his porcelain vases recall the serial repetitions, lines and spaces of Donald Judd or Walter De Maria. However, drawing on his in-depth study and engagement with porcelain traditions, de Waal's works bear the intricate traces of his work and object making, their compositions evoking musical rhythms or the intimate sense of order of a porcelain cabinet.
The cylindrical shapes are arranged at intervals, forming topographies that resemble lines on a page or music in a score. Made in black or white, some windows recall Kazimir Malevich's Black Square (1915), in which the pictorial representation of reality was abandoned for pure abstract form. De Waal's dimensional display cases, however, become subject to ambient lighting as shadows and reflections are cast by the objects within them.
De Waal's installations have long incorporated lines and fragments of poetry into their titles, signaling affinities, inspirations and connections with the literary form. “The Poems of Our Climate” is based on a 1942 poem by Wallace Stevens, in which language is reduced to basic functions, creating an atmospheric calm within the poem. On the minute shards and porcelain tiles, de Waal engraved lines of the poetry that he resonated in his life and guided the creation of his vases and vessels. By emphasizing the literal capacity of the tile as a scripted object, he links the tactile nature of porcelain to the concrete and symbolic nature of poetry, a written medium that functions aurally and associatively. De Waal's metaphysical translations capture the fleeting images of the poem and the immutability of the text, giving a fragmentary and tangible form to the shape of a poem on a page, the movement between two lines, the hesitations, caesuras or intervals.
Edmund de Waal was born in 1964 in Nottingham, England and lives and works in London. Collections include the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, England; Trinity Hall, Cambridge, England; Anglo-Japanese Daiwa Foundation, London; Victoria and Albert Museum, London; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Art Institute of Chicago; and Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. Institutional exhibitions include Signs & Wonders, Victoria and Albert Museum, London (2009); Waddesdon Manor, Aylesbury, England (2012); On White: Porcelain Stories from Fitzwilliam, Fitzwilliam Museum, University of Cambridge, England (2013); Atmosphere, Turner Contemporary, Margate, England (2014); Lichtzwang, Temple of Theseus, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna (2014); and white: a design by Edmund de Waal, Royal Academy of Arts, London (2015). In 2016, de Waal was curated during the Night at the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna. His first set design appeared in Yugen, a new ballet by choreographer Wayne McGregor presented this year at the Royal Opera House in London as part of the international centenary celebrations of Leonard Bernstein's birth. De Waal is also famous for his family memoir, The Hare with Amber Eyes (2010), which won the RSL Ondaatje Prize and the Costa Biography Award, among others, and has been translated into over thirty languages.
De Waal's White Island exhibition at the Museu d'Art Contemporani d'Eivissa in Ibiza, Spain closes on September 16, 2018. This September, De Waal's first architectural intervention in America will take place at the Schindler House, a West Coast Modernist landmark in Los Angeles.
