Edmund de Waal
Born 1964 in Nottingham and moved to Canterbury aged 12. Edmund discovered Kettle's Yard in 1981 when he visited his older brother, who was studying at the University of Cambridge.
Edmund read English at the University of Cambridge but was also developing an interest in pottery, throwing pots in the basement of one of the colleges. He set up his own pottery in Wales, then Sheffield, heavily influenced by Bernard Leach. He increasingly move away from Leach, developing his own style. He had a solo exhibition at Kettle's Yard in 2007. At the time of interview Edmund ran his own studio in south London.
By: Robert Wilkinson
Length: 1 hour 12 mins
Media: On 5 tracks on CD with summary
Interview id: MYKY28
Developing an exhibition across the house and the gallery in 2007
View: Transcript Theme: House as gallery
There is always the difficulty, what can you possibly bring into Kettle's Yard? How can you possibly dare to move something around in Kettle's Yard? So that would have been a kind of project which would have been very difficult, would have framed me entirely within Jim's aesthetic, but to get the chance to do something in the gallery as well, meant that I could show where I got to with my thinking and also have a conversation with Kettle's Yard and that was wonderful, absolutely wonderful and it's been by far the most complicated and stimulating exhibition I've ever had to do and it's moved me on in lots and lots of ways. What I wanted to do was to reflect my own experience of the house so there were three or four different experiences I wanted to bring out, my own conversation with the house. So, for instance, one of my great conversations with Kettle's Yard is about reading, reading and pots, so that the piece in the library was very much about... instead of sitting down and reading a book, you sat down and had a pot there instead of a book.
Direct link to audio: .mp3
Enjoying reading in the house, surrounded by artworks, early 1980s
View: Transcript Theme: House as artwork
The thing about being able to sit and read in Kettle's Yard, to look and read simultaneously, seemed to me completely correct actually, that actually it was not the sanctified space of art where one valorised object sits beautifully lit and that you pay homage to it and that everything else is aligned as if there's nothing there but you and the art object. But it seemed to me utterly so wonderful to be able to sit in an armchair with a David Jones book of poetry and have a Gaudier-Brzeska sculpture in front of you or the pebbles or whatever. It seemed to me that's actually how life is. What made sense was both the domesticity of it, you know, the house-ness of it. The fact that it had all the different kinds of spaces in which you could be and you could move between them and have different moods, to sit or be in different kinds of spaces and still look at things, but then it was also the encounter between the objects and the house so that again those hierarchies seem to be broached.
Direct link to audio: .mp3
