Art 380 - Edmund de Waal

Figure1. a lecture on the weather 2015

290 porcelain vessels in wood, aluminium, and glass vitrine, 105.7 x 158.4 x 11 cm

Edmund de Waal is an artist and writer, best known for his installations of porcelain vessels housed in minimal structures, often created in response to collections and archives or the history of a particular place. De Waal continually investigates themes of memorial, materiality and the colour white. These themes around materiality and the colour white are something I also feature in my own artist practice.

I have been particularly inspired by two installation works by De Waal, a lecture on the weather 2015 (figure 1) and Morandi 2017 (figure 2). I found both installations fascinating and inspiring due to the fact that De Waal has focused on how he displays his simple, yet elegant monochromatic vessels. He has organised them into perfectly aligned rows and columns on shelves up on the wall, something that I intend to feature in my own artist practice. In Morandi, he has contained his vessels in a geometric structure and displayed them on top of a plinth, these various ways of displaying the same object will have different interactions from an audience, I plan on displaying my own vessels in different locations and display them in various methods to see whether they will invoke a new reaction.