It only occurs to me halfway through lunch that my companion might have more reason to care what the food he’s eating has arrived on than most of us. When you are an award-winning ceramicist renowned for the exquisite simplicity of your creations; when you describe yourself as having an obsession with white; and when your lifelong working relationship with porcelain takes such a hold that you have to write an entire book about it – well, then you probably notice the plates. So, I ask Edmund de Waal, potter par excellence, author of The Hare with Amber Eyes and now The White Road, is it the kind of thing that strikes him immediately?
“No,” he says, emphatically.
A pause, then, conspiratorially: “OK. Can I say something?” Please.
“I hate square plates.” There are various shapes amid the many on the table, and square is very definitely one of them. “I love this place, but actually no one after the year 2000 can have a square plate. You can print that.”
Anything else?
“No slate, please. No fake dustbins with chips in them. Come on. You know what you should really eat off? White plates.” He would say that, of course. Does he mind the earthenware plates in front of us? “I don’t.” Another pause, as if he really doesn’t want to correct me. “This is actually not earthenware. It’s pretending to be earthenware. It’s got fake throwing lines.”
Wow. Who knew you could even have a fake throwing line? But if all this makes Edmund de Waal sound like a somewhat serious cove, he isn’t, and nor is he remotely judgmental: deeply engaged and thoughtful when he’s talking about his work, the rest of the time there’s a kind of antic playfulness about him. We are lunching at Toast, an utterly delicious but quite modish restaurant (though no slates or dustbins) in East Dulwich, where De Waal lives with his wife and three children, and also has his studio. (The cooking challenge in his family life, he says, is catering for a vegetarian, a carnivore and a fish-but-not-meat-eater; but what delights him most is discovering his teenage sons devouring vast quantities of bread late at night, as he used to do.) We contemplate the assorted dishes of beetroot and pumpkin and sand carrots (so called because they are grown in sand, rendering them sweeter and brighter, we are told), each garnished with a little bit of aged cheese, or a sprinkling of dukkah. “So what we’re looking at,” says de Waal, “is self-confident use of vegetables here, aren’t we?”
Normally, he lunches lightly, but with a lot of people: in the studio, someone makes a meal every day, and they sit down together to baked spuds, or a risotto – seven studio members and a constant flow of visitors, journalists, family members. Only De Waal is exempt from the cooking rota – “not grandeur”, he insists, but a shifting schedule and frequent absences: as well as white, a project currently at the Royal Academy, next year will see exhibitions in Vienna and Berlin. And The White Road demanded even more extensive travels.
It began, as The Hare with Amber Eyes before it, as a need to “sort things out”. The earlier book, which won the Costa Biography award and the Ondaatje prize, traced De Waal’s family history as part of the Ephrussi banking dynasty, whose fortunes and property were seized by the Nazis in Vienna; at its heart was a collection of 264 netsuke figures saved from the Palais Ephrussi and eventually inherited by De Waal from his great uncle Iggie. “I was trying to work out, while there was still time, why my dad had never talked about his childhood, basically. Why there were such strange silences growing up.” Given that his father went on to become the Dean of Canterbury, those silences must have seemed particularly puzzling. Indeed, he explains, there was “this huge, bizarre displacement of living in a very publicly Christian family, growing up in Canterbury Cathedral. And yet my dad’s got a foreign name, and an Austrian accent, and is Jewish.”
The White Road might seem a far less personal story – except that it becomes clear that the connection De Waal feels with porcelain, the material he has worked with throughout his career, is both intense and dynamic. The book – “a pilgrimage of sorts” – begins in China, in Jingdezhen, the “city of porcelain”, but rapidly spreads out, taking De Waal to places as dissimilar as Venice, Cornwall, Dresden and the Appalachians. “I was really beginning to question why it was always porcelain,” he explains. “I wanted to really look at what I was using, and it seemed to me bizarre to be at this point in my life, using this material every day and not having gone back into it.”
But the book is a great deal more than a history; in it, De Waal examines the cost – “cost seems to be the word I keep coming back to” – of the material so highly prized for its purity that it was thought to banish poison. “Making something pure,” as he says, is “very hard work – and someone does the work.” He locates porcelain in some of history’s worst episodes – Himmler facilitated and oversaw the creation of a porcelain factory in Dachau; during the Cultural Revolution came the nightmarish juxtaposition of “horrific famine and total terror, and this demand to make a tea-set for Chairman Mao”.
De Waal speaks with such clarity and force about connoisseurship and commodification – “beauty and power serve each other in terrible ways” – that it seems he also wanted to examine to what extent he himself was implicated in porcelain’s history. Is the book about that, too?
“Absolutely. It’s all very cheerful – I’ve been a potter all my life, etc, etc, etc, there’s been pure play, and having this interesting aesthetic, obsessing about white – but, of course, yes, I’m also making things in a highly complicated art world of oligarchical people. So what am I doing? It’s a proper question to ask yourself.”
Some people, I note, don’t put themselves through this kind of scrutiny; they accept the world and its history for what they are, and get on with what they want to do. “Absolutely, I never police anyone else’s morality about their use of materials, or asking or not asking questions; that would be a terrible thing to do around other people’s art. And, of course, not everyone obsessively spends five years writing a book trying to work out what they’re doing, or spends seven years writing about their dad’s family. And perhaps it’s not necessary. But that’s the way I work – very slowly, over long periods of time.”
His ceramics are remarkable for their seemingly ceaseless quest for variations on the same theme; iterations of an idea with minute and subtle differences. “The pleasures of making have not diluted at all over the years,” he says. “So people think, ‘how extraordinarily limited, sitting at the wheel making vessels all day’, and it’s just wonderful, endlessly exploratory – about balance and form and volume.”
He and his team experiment continually with glazes, display furniture, lighting; but he always comes back to these massed pieces. Why, I ask, are lots of things together so powerful? “It slows you down. As soon as you’re in the presence of huge multiple objects, you’re in a rhythm, with pause and repetitions, and whole series of things where you’re looking and feeling differences and similarities between objects.” A single object, he says, can be “a very beautiful noun, but as soon as you’ve got many, you’ve got the beginnings of a sentence, of a phrase, of a paragraph, of a page”. Does it ever all go wrong? “Of course. Which is why there’s a hammer in the studio.”
If he’s a perfectionist, it seems less because of an inner narcissism than a feeling that he’s bound to a vocation stretching back through history and across art forms; he often finds himself searching for the right medium for whatever he’s trying to say at the time: “It’s not always clear what’s going to end up where; not everything has to become an object, not everything has to become words.” Throughout, though, there is this sense of stalking the remarkable, of trying to capture something that should, by rights, be near transcendent. “I don’t want to be OK. I want to do something so beautiful and compelling that people fall over. Have another sand carrot.”
Celan: Sound and Visions, featuring Edmund de Waal, is at Kings Place, London N1 on 12 November. The White Road: A Pilgrimage of Sorts (Chatto & Windus, £20). Click here to buy a copy for £14 from the Guardian Bookshop
