Edmund de Waal

Hello, I'm Kirstie Young. Thank you for downloading this podcast of Desert Island Discs from BBC Radio 4. For rights reasons, the music choices are shorter than in the Radio broadcast. For more information about the program, please visit bbc.co.uk/radio4. My cast away this week is the artist and writer Edmund Deval. His ceramics are on display in many of the world's major museums and indeed in many of the world's swankiest homes. Delicate pots in shades of white and cream, informed he says by a great deal of thinking about literature. In turn, the written work he's produced has got plenty people thinking and won him several awards. His book The Hear with Amber Eyes traced the rich and dramatic story of his family's Russian Jewish heritage and diaspora in Odessa, Paris, Vienna and Tokyo. He says, "I make pots and I write. I'm not one of those people who, by mistake, became a potter or by mistake, is a writer. They are both completely entwined. And so as somebody who is recognised in both fields at a high level then, how do you juggle the writing and the ceramics?" It doesn't feel like a juggling act at all. It's really very odd to say this. But it's very easy for me to walk from my wheel, having made a board of pots and sit down and read or begin to make notes for something I'm writing. And they all happen the same space. So it doesn't feel like I'm being wrenched from one thing into another. They do absolutely feed each other. So juggling yes, but it doesn't feel demanding in that sense of having to make choices the whole time. And you say, "Rigorous yet quite passionate and humane. That's what I want people to think when they look at my pots. That's a really intriguing phrase." Well, rigorous. Yes, because I mean, for going to say I spent almost 40 years making these things now. And they are rigorous. They don't happen by mistake. They don't happen by chance. They are thought through. And there's a whole lot of discipline in learning how to make them. But at their heart, they are simple, fragile, puzzling objects which fit in your hand. They've got the mark of the person who made them. And it's just clay and a hand. That's all actually it is. So they are humane. But humane, I want that on my gravestone. And they have a real sort of artistic purity to them. And as I understand it, they are made in a studio that you have to go down a bit of a grubby old track to get to. And there's a bookies and a car repair workshop next to you. It's not exactly where I would imagine these objects of pure and rear beauty coming out of. I'm not grand. But the thing is that you come to the studio however way you come to your studio, you come to your desk, have a way you come to your desk. And then the rest of the world does actually fall away. You still are faced with an empty screen or an empty notebook or a bag of clay which has to be transformed. And so actually it is a beautiful contemplative minimalist studio, etc. But actually the challenge is always the same. What are you going to do next? Let's have some music then. And what are we going to hear for us to all today? We're hearing Elephant Sterled, Mac the Knife. Now you've been very particular about the recording you want, which we love in our cast. But tell us why you've been particularly. Wait a minute. This is music as it should be. This is making it up as you go along. This matters to me because this is what the experience of making things is like. So we try to make a knife. That was Elephant Sterled with her own interpretation there of Mac the Knife. You were enjoying an airpum. I'm not sure you got enough of that. But that's improvisation. You see that's what you think you've got it made before you start. And then it all goes. it doesn't go wrong. It just goes different. And then you have to. you're alive. That's the moment of absolute aliveness. Which is what music is about and what I do is about. Let's talk for a minute then about the subject that is central to your book The Here With Amber Rice, which is the Netsky. That's how you say it. Netsky. Well you describe what they are. I mean they look to me. There you go. There's got one in your pocket. I didn't dare hope that you would have one. That's a rat. And this is carved in what? That's ivory 17 AC by a cover of rats with beautiful black in laid eyes. It is a glorious object. What were they originally carved for? They're toggles. They hold a little bag from your belt, which goes around your kimono. And they're all completely different. So they might be for example this is a tiny rat. It might be two people wrestling. Yeah, or whatever. Whatever. They're a little bit more disturbing. That's a woman in her bath. Ah yes. And that really is rather detailed. It's very beautiful. So you inherited a collection of how many of these Netsky? 264 of them. I was given them by this very marvelous great uncle of mine, my great uncle Iggy, who I loved. Who lived in Tokyo. It was an elderly Jewish emigre. And when he died, they came to me. And no one asked me to, but I felt a responsibility to kind of tell the story and find out why they'd been so significant in the family. So it was a mad idiotic quest really. But I got given these objects. And these objects said, we're here for a reason and do something about it. You don't do something about it. You're going to end your life having failed. Can you explain to me a little bit about the importance of things? I mean, it's something you've written about a lot. And it is, in a sense, for an artist, potentially an unfashionable thing to promote this idea that we have a connection to bits and bobs that are quite valuable. Your holding is something that someone made. And when you pick up something that someone has made and spent time thinking through. And it's been through so many hands. And that's what things do. They move around the world. But as they move around the world, their significance changes. They gain stories like a patterner. And so what you've got when you pick something up, and it can be a net scare, it can be a pot or it can be whatever it is, you've got someone and you've got a material. And when those two things come together, you've got a story, the beginning of a story. So ancient and so beautiful. I don't know if you'll be prepared to tell me how much they're worth. I can only imagine they're immensely valuable. Yes. Will you tell me how much they're worth? No, because that's a mistake. You know, because, of course, I'll never sell them. They go on their journey through my children. But the other thing is that the money thing around objects is actually completely inconsequential to me. Value is elsewhere. I just hope your tries have just done with any holds in the pocket. They're so beautiful and precious. Time for some more music, Edmund. What are we going to hear today? We're going to hear from the four last songs by Strauss in Ardendrott. This is Strauss' last music he did at the end of his life. And this is incredibly beautiful music that both my grandmother and my great uncle, Iggy, who gave me the net scare, absolutely loved. And so this is music that takes me to Vienna, it takes me to them, it takes me to conversations. And so this is a very beautiful music that I've never heard before. And so this is a very beautiful music that both my grandmother and my great uncle, Iggy, who gave me the net scare, absolutely loved. and stuff, but there were always dozens of people coming in and meals and theatre and music out in the house. I'm not romanticising it. It was a very remarkable experience to be part of that community really. And you were a little brain box, weren't you? A little smarty pants. You were very capable in school. My brothers are more capable than me. I mean, I come on, I'm that my parents blessed them said, "Thank God he's good with his hands." So, I'm not having that. I love that we all read and yes, books were important. I'm wondering, your mother having four boys in five years, where did you find the space and the piece to write a book? Well, she did lots of things. She used to just take herself away. That was the main thing. That's one of the things I learned about being a writer. Is that ability to kind of just take yourself away, even if you're sitting at the kitchen table to write? And the other thing she used to do was to arbitrarily send us to bed. Years later, she told us this. She just used to completely invent the time we weren't to bed. Really like the sound of the music. Yeah, she's good skills. When did you first throw a pot? Is that it? I was five and my dad went to an evening class and I pestered him and pestered him and he took me with him. And I was five and I went into the post-reasonry studio and that was it. I sat down and I made a very lumpy bowl, but I can remember the experience of feeling this extraordinary thing. What did it feel like? Well, it's alive. That's the extraordinary thing about clay. It moves. And this bizarre thing that where there was no space, you created a volume. And I made it. I loved it. I loved it. Then the nice woman there said, paint it some nice bright colours. And I said, no, it's white and white pots. So my first pot was white. So I was setting my 40, God knows, how many years of making white pots. What white does allowed this thing to have a presence, more presence than if I tried to paint flowers on it. And you felt it was a fire. I knew it. So that was it. I knew that I was going to be a potter. Do you get the same sensation now as you got when you were five when you did it? I get joy. I get that absolute sense of this being a really very, very sane thing to do. I'm happier when I'm making them when I'm writing. The sitting down at the wheel is still more core for me than the pen. That's have some music. It's your third of the day. What are you going to hear? Well, this is beautiful because this is my childhood. This is the choir in Lincoln Cathedral. And you have to imagine growing up next to the most beautiful Cathedral. And that experience of walking to school through a Cathedral has empty spaces and then hearing voices. I mean, it's amazing. [Music] [Music] Lincoln Cathedral choir singing Colledium Regale from the Nunk Dimitris by Herbert Howles. So then Edmund Devalue, your father became Dean of Canterbury Cathedral. Obviously, that was quite an important thing for him. But it proved to be a very important thing for you too. You were 12th and you met a man called Jeffrey Whiting. Yes. And he was important because. Because he was a potter. He was a remarkable man. And he worked in a studio in Canterbury, which was attached to the school I went to. And I just fell under his spell really. And I used to spend every afternoon making pots with him and cleaning up, you know, sweeping the dusty clay floor. And from the age of 12, I was there every day. A lot of people can have little obsessions. You know, it can be horse riding or it can be playing football or it might be collecting stamps. But by the time they're 12, their head gets turned by all sorts of other distractions. Yours didn't. I mean, what I realised very, very early on with him was this extraordinary thing, which is that it's a life. it's a life ahead of you. And that there's no hurry. But you might as well get going on it. And he said a wonderful thing. He said, "The first 30,000 pots you make are the worst." And then it gets easier. Right. Was he right? He was right. I think 30 or 40,000 possibly. So I worked with him and it turned into a proper two-year apprenticeship. And what he would do was to say this week it's mugs or it's casseroles. And I would just throw three, four, hundred mugs. And then at the end of the week he would look at them all, critique them and they'd break them all up and start again on Monday. And that was the way you learn to throw. And breaking them all up is an important or as important part of the process as making the music. Well, it is. It's about letting go and moving on. It's unusual because it's pottery. But if you were talking to a musician that would have a complete resonance. They'd say, of course, of course it takes years to learn how to do it. And now when you're making you're beautiful and highly collectible pieces, what do you do with the ones that don't go that aren't that bad? Well, then they're broken up. I didn't spend a week breaking up pots anymore. But there are still things that go wrong. They get broken. Absolutely. The hammer is a useful workshop tool. Do you not just give them to friends? I mean, I'm sure they're quite beautiful the ones you break up. They're probably giving to friends that they turn up in auction houses. How a dearer the friend. So no, no, things get broken. Is it difficult to break something? No, it's joyful. I mean, the sound of breaking porcelains, a wonderful, wonderful sound. So you were quite, I know you were going to resist this, but I just have to tell people, you were a brilliant young student who was awarded an early place at Cambridge and you decided to defer that. Yeah, so I spent some time in Japan when I was 17 and spent a very good summer working with potters there. And that's when I first met my great uncle Egi properly. And then I came back and did my apprenticeship. And the reason for going to Japan is for. Yeah, Japan is the potter's country. It's a place where there are generations of people. In villages have been making pots. So you can go to a place and they say, yeah, I'm the 17th generation of people who've been making this particular kind of tea bowl. It's incredible. And so it's a culture where people love pottery. You can talk to a taxi driver about tea bowls. Okay, that does not happen in South London. The second thing is Japan was really important because the tradition in which I was learning, Jeffries tradition, was the leech tradition. It was this tradition instituted by this man called Bernard Leech, who was a great pioneer, Edwardian pioneer, who'd gone across to Japan and learnt pottery then brought it back to St. Ives where he started a great, and still there, the leech pottery. And so his tradition, which was English pottery, meets Japan, that was the tradition in which I was learning. The year that you spent in Japan, you said that you were an unbelievably poof-faced disciple of some very grumpy pottery masters. It doesn't sound like a bundle of that. I was terrible. It was terrible, but that was my expectation. I'd gone to sit at the feet of masters. And so the grump here, the more miserable they were, and the more lowly the tasks that I had, the more authentic it felt to me as an experience. I mean, I was 17, I'm going to say, you know, and so poof-faced fits. Let's have some music. What's next? Actually, it's rather good. This is heaven by talking heads. And why have you chosen this? This is my student year. This is the man in the suit. This is music and the joy of being at Cambridge. To get to the bar, name of the bar. The bar is called heaven. That was talking heads in heaven from the album Stop Making Sense and memories for you, Edmund de Valle of those Hedy student days and all the parties that you enjoyed. You gained not too many parties, obviously, because you gained a first class degree in English, but you also gained a wife. I met Sue at Cambridge. Yes, she was studying that and yes, we've been together forever. I mean, it's not everybody that is a potter. How did she take it? I mean, it's quite an unusual thing for a young man to be doing. The great thing about pottery is that I promised her a life of destitution. I mean, you know, no one wants your pots and you're living on a mountainside and that's it forever. So that's what I said I'm going to go and do and that's what I did. Yes, I don't know if it was a mountainside, you really want it. It was. It was. And we're very remote and you were making horrible brown sort of stew pots and coffee mugs and things. Yeah, which no one wanted. Which, I mean, understandably? They were terrible. I mean, they were quite well made terrible pots, but they were made because that's the tradition in which I come. It was making pots from some else's conviction rather than from actually who I was. And the moments at which you found your path at which you sought these. other things I wanted to make. These are from a different tradition and seeing something different. That was the moment that you met extraordinary sense. It was strange. In desperation I moved from my Welsh hillside, I moved to South Abagon in Sheffield and that student work and then it was porcelain. It was porcelain that did it for me. I'd never worked with porcelain. I'd only worked with these very heavy stone wire clays, these brown grey clays and I had to begin again with porcelain. It's a very strange material. It's heavy, it's not very plastic, it's difficult to use but it's beautiful. Of course I had to learn to throw again and it was like being a child. I had to begin all over again and that re-enchanted me. But the other thing it did was to connect me suddenly to Chinese porcelains, to German wonderful porcelains, to Wedgewood. What I started to do was to rethink how I made things. I was beginning to make this porcelain which was covered in solid and lovely light blue and green glazes and white glazes. But then I started to make them in groups. I put them on the floor and I put them on shelves and I put them in ceilings and I let them and I put them in shadows and I just started to enjoy this experience of putting pots into buildings in different ways. That seemed to connect. It would connect to for me of course because I love buildings and I love how you move through buildings. But it also seemed to connect with people. It seemed to me that there was this almost overnight success for you. How did that affect you? That must have been quite discombobulating, was it? It was fantastic. You know what? Successful overnight, I recommend it to anyone. It was a joy because actually of course I really, really, really put my years in taking my red van around craft shops trying to get people to look at things. And so the idea that actually people would cue in front of an exhibition and buy the stuff was wonderful. And it was liberating because what they were saying was not make more of the same. They're just saying do what you want to do. Yes. And that was fabulous. At times you're fifth pieces of music now Edmund. What are we going to hear and why? We're going to hear Mozart's Allerturka and it's because on a road trip on our honeymoon to an eye we're in California and we stopped at a petrol garage, a gas station. And there was one CD for sale and that's the music that was there. And so we played it all the way up California. [Music] [Music] Metzka Ujsta playing Mozart's Allerturka. You've described Edmund Deval in the Here With Amber Eyes. Among other things this history of touch and you've said that touch is simply not talked about. Why do you think touch is so important? It's what is a primary sensation. You know it's obviously how we how we explore the world when we're very very small. But weirdly it's something that in our particular Western European culture has been slightly abandoned as a subject of conversation. So it's not part of everyday life. There are cultures where touch is paramount where people can have words and concepts for the weight of objects, for the warmth of objects, for how objects fit or don't fit in your hand. And we don't actually have those. No. When I go and see some of your beautiful valuable ceramics in any other museums that were displayed in around the world, I'm not allowed to touch them. No, tough. Yeah. No, you are. No, I mean there are that I put my pots in lots of odd places. Sometimes I make installations which are completely for people to muck around with. And I made one from museum a couple of years ago, which is for children to play with so they can move everything around. And then there are other things where you have to imagine what it's like to feel them. They're up there somewhere remote and you have to put your hands in a gesture towards the objects and have to try and imagine what it's like. You're a father of three children. When they were five, did you sit them down with some clay and say have a go with them? They've always been in and out of the studio. Had they in fact their primary school has always been in and out of the studio. And what difference do you think that has made them? Because there's so much debate right now about the idea that we do get children out of the classroom and get them in among them mud and the dirt. What difference do you think that has made to you are children? Do you know what they have to write their own memoirs about that? I'm not that's their own misery memoir about growing up with a potter dad. I'm not going to call them on that. Okay. But I would say that is there's a huge huge mistake not to allow kids to make a mess. You know mess is where it starts. It's in the flower on the floor and the butter on the everywhere or the clay on your shoes and in your hair. That's when you get this extraordinary, extraordinary excitement about making something that you've never made before. That's really, really important. And so when you've had classes coming into your studio, I mean I do think of your studio, I haven't been there but I think of it as being a quite sort of re-rified environment. So you're not terribly worried about what they might do to the place. No. The worst that can happen is something that's broken but the best that can happen is in Estimol. Let's have some more music then. We're on your six. We're going to hear Philip Glass from Einstein on the beach. Wonderful six-hour opera. A six hour, have you watched it all of the years? Yes, the whole six hours you've watched. We just came and went. Are you allowed to do that? You're allowed to do it. You're encouraged by Philip Glass to come and go. And why do you like this and why have you chosen this? This is counting. This is what my life is about. It's about repetitions, about discovering capacity and space within making something again and again and again. -3 2 3 1 2 2 3 4 5 1 2 3 1 2 1 2 3 4 5 6 1 2 2 1 2 1 2 3 1 2 3 4 5 6. (Hi! He knows who he is!) What are those什麼? -1 2 3 4 4 6 7 3 4 5 6 7 8 4 5 6 7 8 4 5 6 7 8 4 5 6. Philip classes knee play one and so for anybody who's read the book Edmund of all they will know in the here with Amber Rice that you tell the story of these things we've been discussing back at the beginning the netski these beautiful small carved things and you are neither keeper of this family inheritance and people are allowed to just sort of toy with them and play with them as as of indeed they did with them throughout the family's history children love to play with them I understand. -The story of them is about people having conversations around them I mean it's the story which you know as you said from Paris all the way through to me. -And so the idea of them being locked away is wrong they are things to start a conversation with so I hope that will continue. -I asked you earlier about the value of the netski they are very very precious and valuable things you've said of course that that's not the value of them that they there's so much more that's carried with them and it can't be contained on a price tag. The stuff that you make and your explanation from making them is very you know it's very intellectualized and it's incredibly thoughtful. They are things with a huge price tag the things that you make how do you reconcile the idea that value is not important. -I think your experience of an object can be changed by knowing what it costs. -Yes. -But your experience of an artwork or your encounter with something that I make I hope isn't through the prism of its value I hope you get lost in a wall of pots or searching for an installation because a lot of my installations are in odd places or hidden away. None of that is about the money. All of that is about an experience. -And the way they are displayed seems to me to be almost as important as the pieces themselves. They're often partially obscured or they're in parts of for example in the V&A. You know there aren't great sort of arrows pointing. Take a look at these. They're in a place that there is almost unknown and unseen. -Well in that case I mean that's a good example because they're 80 feet up in the dome of the V&A and you can only half see them but they're there in the shadows. Yes I mean it's sculpture that's what I do. The sculpture is how you hold these objects in space. -Time for some more music now. What are we going to hear Edmund? -A favourite bit from Handel's Messiah and it's the extraordinary bit when suddenly there's this line about the refiner's fire, but one thing being turned into another. People, but obviously for me, objects. [Music] That was Sarah Mingada singing, but who may abide from Handel's Messiah. You said that you make your living by letting things go Edmund Deval. What do you hope will happen to the pots that you make, given that you think that, you know, creations bring their own story with some whatever. My experience is a peculiar one of this, because of course I spent so much of my life last few years in my life on the track of this particular collection of objects and thinking about how objects are held together and how they're dispersed and how things get lost. And then found again, and so that whole feeling of objects being perpetually entranced, you can't hold them together, you can't hold things in one place. It's something that means a lot to me. And so I do let go. I mean, my pots, my installations leave the studio and then they're often away. But each installation in some ways is a sort of, is a kind of bet on the future. It's me trying to say I'm wondering whether or not that group of very, very fragile objects will survive in that particular place. By family was a Jewish family that the ones who escaped were dispersed all around the world and that the things they had that made part of their identity as family were also all completely dispersed were lost. And so that idea of how things stay together is very core to who I am. And that's in what I do as a potter. And your children, do they, you've said that, you know, Clay has been a part of their lives and they spent lots of time in an out of Jewish studio. Do they show any affinity with their father's profession? No, not particularly. I would hate them to follow into what I'm doing. I just hope that they find their own path. And will you sort of bequeath them collections of your work and say I want, you know, that let it begin its own story with your family? Yes, yes. I'm very keen on that now. Do you know it's the last actually, it's only a year ago that I actually started putting some of my own work up in the house? Why was that? Up to them, up to them, it used to really bug me, I used to, if I had anything that I'd made in the house, I used to walk past and go, that's wrong, that's just hopeless, that's terrible. And just in the last year, I've begun to enjoy catching sight of things I've made and having them in the house. I'm going to be casting your way shortly, of course, and how do you think you're going to cope with the solitude? Of course I'm not looking forward to it, but I have some experience of being completely by myself. You think you're survived? I'm about the least practical person you can really possibly get, all I can make you pot, so that's it. Make a fire, hopeless. No, that's it. Let's have your final piece of music. The final piece of music is the opening of St. John's Passion by Bach. Bach is completely core for me. I could have given you eight pieces of music by Bach easily. And these opening few moments of this amazing bit of music are all about space and resolution and finding space. It's an extraordinary bit of music. [Music] [Music] Hey, I'm from Bach's St. John's Passion, so I'm going to give you a few things. Now you get, first of all, Edmund Deval to take a book to your island. What book would you like to take? Thanks for that. Single book. Well, of course you do have the complete way of Shakespeare. I mean, have the Bible. This was a tough one, obviously. It's going to be the collected poems of Wallace Stevens. It's an amazing American poet and I just, I come back to them all the time. Right. It's yours and the luxury express-o-maker. I can't live without coffee. Not the Netsky. Oh God, now, leave those behind. It's coffee. I've got to survive by myself. Right. Okay, you can have a very, a very good express-o-maker and lifetime supply. Very much. And the track that you would like to see from the ways. It's going to be the Bach. The final piece of music. Yes, it's about being human, it's just incredible. Edmund Deval, thank you very much for letting us hear your desert island discs. Thank you, it's been a huge privilege. You've been listening to a download from the BBC. You'll find more information on the Radio 4 website. BBC.co.uk/Radio4