The Memory of Objects.
The Provocative Combination of Densities.
I placed a jar in Tennessee,
And round it was, upon a hill.
It made the slovenly wilderness
Surround that hill.
The wilderness rose up to it,
And sprawled around, no longer wild.
The jar was round upon the ground
And tall and of a port in air.
It took dominion everywhere.
The jar was gray and bare.
It did not give of bird or bush,
Like nothing else in Tennessee.
Wallace Stevens, ‘Anecdote of the Jar’ (1919)
Innerness for the potter is always at the heart of the practice, as manifested through the opening up of the thrown vessel.
Inner spaces of defined interiors forming vessels that are intrinsically cyclical through light and dark by way of their surfaces and volumes.
Like the cellar, the pots interior and its containment of light and shadow becomes a dwelling space for a submerged primordial memory. (Bachelard/Trigg)
The clay links the vessel to both locality and our geocentric position.
‘Pleasure is moving from darkness to light and vice-versa.’ (Grafton Architects. Sensing Spaces: 2014)
The pot promotes an architecture of the soul, of an intimate yet social interior illuminated through the imagination.
In The Making : Hollowing out Space through Innerness and Difference. Quietus : Interiors of Silence and Space.
Innerness : A (sensorial) space or even a place interior to its environment
Defined Interiors : By material, agency and social and private architectures.
Interiors of Pots : Analogies with the Hut as both being dwelling places made from the inquiry of form and the need for a reflective solitude.
Fragment as a broken shard, from notebook March 2014.
Innerness
The light of reflection and our immediacy moves from light to dark and from dark to light; from surface to interior and interior to surface. The pot becomes a cyclical vessel reflecting our geocentric origins.
The Hut is a vessel in the making for reflective dwelling.
The Pot with its interior underpins its fidelity, its completeness.
Some pots are tuned and balanced for their “innerness”; others promote their surfaces (noise) at the expense of their interior integrity (quietness).
Vessels of Defined Spaces : Creatures of Light and Dark
In sensing a pots interior from its surface, we are as it were in some intimate tacit correspondence with its spatial sensing centre. We become known to it through its maker’s creative gesture of innemess. This anthropological inner space linking us to the potter is both sensual and distant; its vacancy allows us dwell in the maker’s absence.
Reflections on Heidegger,
We traverse from light to dark many times as we gather in the pots (thingness) as it were unfolding in our presence (nearness).
Vessels as Spatial Metaphors around Innerness and DifferenceThe Jug
Heidegger as a pouring and gathering social metaphor. Anecdote of the Jar.
Dominion over the Unmade.
Wallace Stevens, poem cited by Edmund de Waal.
Atemwende : A breathtum. Edmund de Waal.
The Great Glass Case of Beautiful Things: About the Art Of Edmund de Waal Adam Gopnik. 2013.
‘Actually, I still make pots, you know’ Edmund de Waal. The Sensuality of the Clay Body.
‘You have to work quickly and with definition, and your ideas have to come into focus with enormous rapidity.’ Edmund de Waal, on working with the different presence demanded on ones mind and hand whilst throwing with porcelain. The practice of porcelain forced a change in colour and finish in his work. New glazes, shimmering celadon and shiny black, arrived to catch the light and send it back. (Gopnik,2014:9)
The throwing of pots still remains central to his practice. ‘The material goes down, gets wet, is pulled open by the hand, spins- and then produces, as if by magic, the most transcendently human of all made things; volume, inner space, an interior, the carved out air that connects the morning teacup with the domes and spandrels of San Marco. There’s nothing there but clay and air, then there’s defined air.
(Gopnik,2014:6)
Ceramics and Architecture. Exhibition Spaces of the Enlightenment The Porcelain Rooms
The pot, ancient as it is, is the first instance of pure innerness, of something made from the inside out. Building objects upwards is, in its way, an obvious and brutal thing; it derives from piles, and makes pyramids. Turning objects inward, on the wheel, is a subtler one, and derives from our need to have a place to put things in. (Gopnik,2014:7)
Together these new porcelain vessels collectively produced by De Waal are an experience of possessed space.
These collections of vessels in their Modernist vitrines seem to be both an expression of the architecture of a collection and simultaneously an affirmation of an interior space that can hold the singularity of a breath within a small pot.
‘ The ceramic module that he uses, the small pot, is deliberately made as non functional as possible.’ (Gopnik,2014:9)
‘Even if we insist on seeing them impersonally, the sheer force of their numbers creates the poetic sense inherent, as Homer knew, in all inventories. They gang up on us.’ (Gopnik,2014:9) These groupings of objects placed together produce their own narratives, their own relations, and lines of inquiry. In so doing their ordering of the space around them brings meaning to those spaces. This is reinforced through the poetry and metaphor of the effect of ceramic vessels on space, as cited by De Waal himself through Wallace Stevens’s “Anecdote of the Jar” 1919.
‘The Jar, the elemental made thing, takes dominion over the unmade world. The air around it suddenly looks “slovenly,” insufficiently jar-like. Made things remake the unmade world. (Gopnik,2014:10)
Gopnik comments that we can’t look at hollow things without sensing their hollowness, as he notes we perceive haptically as aptly as optically. This allows us to read these vessels through both our sense of sight and our sense of space. The result is that we feel these objects; we can sense the heft of them made from their weight, shape and size. We become aware that we can feel objects as much as we can see them.
De Waal’s work brings about a sensuality and an empathy manifested between the strict ordering of his presentation through his vitrines and cabinets and the fragility and grouping of his porcelain vessels. This empathy promotes our interest with the interior parts of his groupings, with the interior emptiness and mystery of things we can only sense. His control and command of the geometric spatial relations found in his installations is juxtaposed by the multitude of diminutive interiors and negative spaces.
The relations of the architectural and those of the vessel are in constant flux, held in some sort of spatial narrative that seems to meditate stillness, like the museum these vessels are protected and intact, yet strangely they are held hostage by their surroundings.
The empathy we feel for their emptiness is perhaps choreographed, staged and ultimately forced, these are not just pots as De Waal admits but pots that have been by design rendered as non-functional as possible although they still bare the marks of his franchising. This neutering of his thrown clay forms into the realm of perhaps a purely sculptural object that is itself now a mere component in his Minimalist cabinets. What remains is a hollowness, but a contrived hollowness that speaks of spaces designed not made; unlike his Signs and Wonders intervention for the V&A, these works feel orphaned and cut adrift by their surroundings.
Does? ‘His art takes a familiar grammer of display and turns it into a poetry of memory. Inside a room, a great case filled with rows of porcelain pots. Along each row, a story. Inside each pot, a breath. (Gopnik,2014:11)
Craft and Art, Skill and Anxiety.
Craft is logic, and art defies it. The defiance is what makes art. The serenity of the artisan lies in her knowledge that it can all be done again. The anxiety of the artist; lies in knowing that if it is done again, she has become an artisan. (Gopnik,2014:7)
Edmund de Waal is a maker of objects with imagined histories. (Gopnik,2014:11)
Donald Judd, Untitled, 1980.
Working Notes from Signs and Wonders, Edmund de Waal 2009.
‘De Waal’s installation is a hybrid of the sculptural and the pictorial.’ (Adamson,2009:40)
‘Like Wallace Stevens’s jar, this sculpture is a world unto itself, a self-sufficient object that also gathers its surroundings.’(Adamson,2009:40)
‘Judd’s sculptures occupy an uncertain middle ground between craft and industry. He did not make anything himself; instead he worked closely with a team of highly skilled fabricators. The results have the impersonal, serial quality of mass production, but an intensity of finish that can only be achieved by artisanal methods.’(Adamson,2009:40)
John Roberts, The Intangibilities of Form : Skill and Deskilling in Art after the Readymade. (London,2007)
Judd’s wall hung stacked sculptures defy direct relationships with the floor; he has in effect taken sculpture of the plinth and into its surroundings. His stacks appear to be only part of an infinitely larger sculptural form that extends down and beyond the floor as well as into the infinity of the space above.
Contemporary Architecture and Construction. Interior Design through Intervals.
Spatial and Temporal Extensions. The Sculptural and the Pictorial.
Working Notes : Clay, Interior Skins of Light and Dark. Contemporary Ceramic Practices in Craft and Design.
Interior Spaces. Environments and Atmospheres. Ceramic Building Technologies.
Screens, Boundaries and Borders.
Sensuality, Materiality as Memory in the Poetics of Space.
Breaking The Mould : New Approaches to Ceramics. 2007
Ceramic Environments.
Space/Time based work, using clay in large-scale contexts, in gallery or outside spaces to create a fully immersive moment that challenges the common perception of what clay is capable of.
Surreal Geometries.
Makers who use large and small-scale sculpture that is in some way abstracted or represents a heightened version of reality.
The Vessel.
Works around the practicalities of functional ceramics. Human Interest.
Explorations into the human form and human nature. Beyond The Vessel.
Experimentation around the ideas of deconstructing the vessel. Earthly Inspirations.
Formal and conceptual properties of using the very nature of clay. Surface Pleasures.
The exterior skin of ceramics and clay.
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