Edmund de Waal
26 May - 22 July 2007
Edmund de Waal came to know Kettle’s Yard while studying English at Trinity Hall in the mid ’80s. With its combination of architectures, works of art, furniture and other objects, it has remained a touchstone for him and a key to recent developments in his work.
As a potter and a writer about ceramics, de Waal has long reflected on how pots have been presented and perceived. Using the variety of spaces in the gallery and extending into the house with its permanent collection, de Waal installed a series of installations, many of them made specially for the exhibition. The first, ‘A Change in the Weather’, offered the visitor a pot for each day of the year. Further on, there were pots in a skylight, on shelves and in boxes, and running along the street-front window sill. In the last space, we were enticed to glimpse into a room – a Wunderkammer – lined and stacked with 342 plates. In the house, smaller installations, such as ‘Ghost’ replaced the normal pots and found their way into bookshelves and cupboards.
The exhibition was organised with the Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art, where it later travelled to. It was grant-aided through the Arts Council England Lottery Fund and by the University of Westminster.
Discover more
Edmund de Waal
Find out more about the artist here.
Listen
Listen to the artist reminiscing about reading in the house in the early 1980s, and hear more about the process of putting on this exhibition in 2007.
Memories of the 1980s
Memories of the exhibition
Shop
Find writing and art by Edmund de Waal available to buy in our shop.
The White Road
Through intimate and compelling encounters with the people and landscapes who made porcelain, Edmund de Waal tells the history of this rare material, the ‘white gold’ he has worked with for decades.
Artist Buttons
From 2023, ten leading artists have been creating limited edition sets of buttons in support of Kettle’s Yard. Edmund de Waal has created these buttons as an elegy for the ceramicist Lucie Rie.
