Edmund de Waal What Do Artists Do All Day?

Everything begins, always begins, with a lump of clay,

with me sitting by myself.

That's my complete alpha moment of...

That's what it's about for me.

The exhibition is full of vessels...

..and it's full of repeated vessels.

That's an expression of time, of spending time

repeating, making things.

By repeating them, it's not industrial at all, actually.

It's not... It hasn't got that kind of severity about it,

but what it has got is the sense of...

Of spending time. You know, one person spending time.

Since the last show two and a half years ago, I've really been...

concentrating on what vitrines mean.

Vitrine is a glass case, but in this case it means...

A vitrine means any frame,

any sculptural frame, which holds my objects.

Erm...

And so there are all kinds of different

interpretations of vitrines within the show.

Erm... But one of things that I m trying to do

with the vitrines is to find more and more space within them

Hello? Hello?

I'm sorry I didn't get round to you yesterday. I was...

If that's convenient with you, it's convenient with me.

Fantastic. Thank you, Ian.

CLASSICAL MUSIC PLAYS

It's set in stone. Fine. In that case, I'll do it

SHE SPEAKS INCOHERENTLY Fine.

So, it's like the insert into the... Oh. OK.

What she wants to know is, did you need to...?

Yes. Yes.

It has to be these proportions

The balance between sort of family life and time by myself

in the studio, and writing and the sort of, the press stuff,

and the talking stuff is... It's always difficult to kind of ..

to achieve balance.

But the...

..the reality is that there's a complete imperative for me,

a complete straightforward thing,

which says, "Go to the studio and make things."

And that... I...

This is our little...electric kiln.

Kind of fantastically and bizarrely, it seems to be yellow on...

That's a test.

There's a particular Chinese poem,

which talks about the sound of porcelain...

which is...

..fantastic.

It's...like birdsong.

It's kind of tenth century...

Tenth-century poem about drinking.

And...

as you drink, you listen to the porcelain cups.

I just thought that was a particularly...

..beautiful...

So this is... You can see how..

How subtle this is. This is...

So, this is, if you look at it again against a hard white,

you can see that it's almost something like sort of clotted cream,

but it's going to be absolutely beautiful in a vitrine.

So, that is a successful...

unpacking of a kiln.

It's not always like that.

Just happens...

Happens to be on film, this one

That's good.

CLASSICAL MUSIC PLAYS

It's wonderful to work to music It's absolutely...

It's a very great privilege to be able to sit and work to - with music.

It liberates you cos you're not concentrating in that

kind of slightly over-focussed way on what your hands are doing.

There are, kind of, very special bits of music, which really,

really matter to me.

I listen to lots and lots and lots of classical music.

I spent the summer listening to Mozart's Piano Sonatas.

And then there's really quite a lot of American minimalist music

where there's repetition and there's surreality being explored,

and that of course is absolutely present in my work.

So...

I was working last night, making a frame for this series of pots

and I left them out last night to get drier.

Erm... But then I started to work again on these.

These took till about 6.30 this morning.

And they are...what's called leather-hard.

So, they are hard enough to trim ..

which I do using these different turning tools.

Some of them are wooden. Some of them are metal.

Some of them are very, very old

I got them from the guys I apprenticed to.

And what I was trying to do was to really...

sort of rearticulate their face

That I wanted when...

I'm taking off excess clay, but I'm also redefining the profiles.

Sharper edges.

Erm...inscribing lines, sometimes, on the pots.

Just generally...

..revealing the shape that I want...

That I wanted to...

..create.

I'm...

This is...

For me, is absolutely as much pleasure as the throwing.

It's a deeply, deeply pleasurable bit to hold...

a whole one.

When I was working on this VNA project, I had this way

of working where I'd go and look at something that I really cared about,

and look at it for a long, long time until it was burned in my retina.

I'd go away. I wouldn't have a photograph of it.

I'd just use that kind of after image...

and strangely enough, it was a very powerful image,

but it was a blurred image at the same time.

And so what I wanted to do was to make objects, which had that power

of... That powerful sense of being looked at for a very, very long time

and being out of focus.

Being so powerful that you couldn't quite concentrate on them.

And in this show...

A Thousand Hours, there are several pieces

where there are objects, which are...

Are sort of kept at a distance They're blurred.

You can't get your hands on them. You can't...get your eyes on them.

They come and go.

And it's not me being annoying and tricksy and postmodern at all.

It's about thinking through very, very

hard about the presence of objects, why objects can matter so much

and that sometimes objects...

..can be blurred.

They can be more powerful because they're not absolutely in focus

It's very, very intuitive and so I kind of place it very quickly.

And almost always it's wrong.

Almost always it's almost right but almost right is...

The difference between almost right and right is enormous,

so you then sort of have to spend time...

coming back, looking, looking, looking.

And sometimes you just have to walk away and say,

"Do you know what? It doesn't work. It just..."

The... The scale of it, the mood of it.

the atmosphere, it's just not there.

I think yesterday was a very long day.

It's a bit... What time did you finish?

About ten.

In the middle of the night on a boat, there's...

the middle watch, which is right in the middle of the night,

and it's the most crucial watch in some ways

cos everyone else is asleep.

And there's that kind of quality in the middle of the night,

as well, of attentiveness,

of...when the whole world is sort of stilled

and all kinds of ideas and images occur to you.

It's a very ambivalent moment.

Things can be very creative in the middle of the night

and can be also terribly negative in the night.

So it's that idea of, really, of paying attention...

..to the seen and the unseen.

It's obviously hundreds of pots

Hundreds and hundreds of pots in it.

Over 600.

And the idea of them is that you sort of

see something and you pay attention to that

and then you lose that pot

amongst the next 50 or 60 or 100 of them

and then you catch sight of another pot, which has an echo

So it's that thing about focusing and not focusing.

'I had a very severe plan,

'which I knew wasn't right.

'So everything was put out in this severe way and then

'I could just find the spaces

'by moving those pots around.

'It's all about moving between them.

'That space between them, you're drawn between them and round them.

'And as you're drawn round them

'you realise that some things are held clearly.

'You can see them.

'And some things are in shadows

'and some things behind opaque glass,

'so that they are completely blurred, completely shadowy.

'And all these objects are held in different places within

'this small building, this space '

WOMAN CHEERS

So, what's it about?

What it is is just a way of slowing you down.

It's a way of slowing you down and making you...

It's a way of slowing you down and making you look and think

and walk around objects.

That's all it is. But that's enough.

That's not a bad thing to want to do with objects.

And it's called A Thousand Hours.

I mean, it's a thousand objects

It's taken up way over a thousand hours to make,

actually, in reality.

Way, way, way over.

SHOUTING IN BACKGROUND

What do they do out there, these shouty men?

They're full-time shouty men.

Their maleness allows them to occupy as much space as they want,

mostly through shouting.

INTERVIEWER LAUGHS

'I'd seen his kind of individual pots in various places

'and then it was shortly after he started to install them

'all together, that I took more notice.'

And he put a very long one, which I thought was particularly beautiful.

And I was talking to one of my colleagues who had actually worked

with him a bit before and she'd written

an introduction for a catalogue

And I said, "Let's go and see him."

And so, she gave him a call and she said,

"Well, his studio's just up in Tulse Hill.

"We can go one morning."

It was really strange, because normally it doesn't happen this way.

We were sitting there in his studio and,

after we had been talking for about 20 minutes...

I mean, Edmund didn't know I was going to do this

and my colleague didn't know I was going to do this.

Suddenly I opened my mouth and said,

"Would you like to do an exhibition with me?"

It's really quite unusual.

But it just felt right. The whole thing felt right.

And the funny thing was that as I was leaving that initial

meeting with him in the studio

he just mentioned in his usual humble way,

"I've written this book. It shouldn't get in the way of the exhibition,

"because I think only a few of my friends are going to buy it

"So, you know, I mean it's fine

"In fact, I don't even know why I mentioned it."

I'm standing here with Edmund de Waal.

'Edmund de Waal.'

WOMAN: 'The author Edmund de Waal.'

His book The Hare With Amber Eyes

took the world by storm last year.

APPLAUSE

I'm Edmund de Waal...

APPLAUSE

The years I spent travelling and researching

and writing The Hare,

of course, it changed what I make,

just as what I make changes the way I write.

They are absolutely...

They are completely connected.

And, at the heart of my book,

the heart of The Hare,

is a story about what collecting means.

What collecting means, what it is to hold a collection together

and what it is to contemplate objects,

the dispersal of objects.

The diaspora of objects, the falling away of their meaning.

The more I think about those themes,

the kind of... I think the more nuanced

these installations become.

Although they're separate activities,

the writing and the making of the pot,

the two things in Edmund's mind are connected.

You know? And there are a lot of literary allusions in the titles

of the works, bringing people's attention to the correspondence

between the pots and literature, between...

And particularly poetry, I think. You know?

And some of the installations he's made for this exhibition echo

the shape of the lines of text in poems.

So you get these works where the shelves are of uneven lengths,

just as the lines of poetry would be uneven lengths.

In the book, you know,

which all centres on this collection of netsuke figures that were hidden

during the war in Vienna and so a lot of the installations,

he places high up on the walls or round the corners

as if they're hidden, like the netsuke were hidden,

and so his installations are also hidden.

I mean The Hare With Amber Eyes is absolutely a love affair with

tactility and what touch means

and its essential nature of being human and its relationship to touch,

I mean that's absolutely what a large

part of what The Hare With Amber Eyes deals with.

Um, and my installations aren't touched.

But every object within them has been touched

and actually holds touch within it so you look at them

and you see touch.

You might not be picking them up and feeling the weight of them

and feeling the edges and whatever as much as I did

when I was making them but it's still there.

It's just different.

There was a sort of polemic argument early on in the 20th century

about the status of pottery,

that pottery was this link between sculpture and painting

I don't think that's relevant any more.

I mean, for me, it is sculpture

It is sculpture made up of ceramics.

Sometimes, that's very painterly.

Sometimes, they're objects, which recede into the wall,

you know, to become compositions but mostly,

they are attempts to think

about how you capture a bit of space

and bring an object into focus or out of focus in that bit of space.

I kind of do come to this place

sit over there behind me at my wheel and make things and I love it

and everything else drops away at that point.

You know, I do manage to keep all those things at bay.

'So, you don't ever miss a simpler...life?' No.

No, I mean I had a simpler life

I had a much, much simpler life

when I was making things that no one liked and I didn't like myself

you know, a long, long way away in bits of

the Welsh borders 30 years ago and I don't miss that at all.

I'm now very, very...

..happy trying to bring the things I want to make into existence.

I'm learning, you know, and what I'm learning is that the kinds

of things I want to do take lots of people and time and resources.

You know, that's the reality.

And so, it's being very careful about the fact that everything

begins with...

..always begins with a lump of clay

and me sitting by myself making a pot.

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