Artist Biography
Edmund de Waal (b. 1964, Nottingham, United Kingdom, based in London, United Kingdom) is an artist, ceramicist and writer. His visual and literary works explore how objects, with their inherent instability in meaning, are vehicles for human narrative, emotion and connection across time and cultures. This is deepened by his interest in the practice of collecting and collections, from which he investigates themes of diaspora, displacement, history and memory.
de Waal’s apprenticeship with celebrated potter Geoffrey Whiting in the early 1980s and subsequent training in Japan honed his approach towards ceramic techniques across Chinese, Japanese and medieval English traditions. Known for large-scale installations of handmade porcelain objects which are carefully composed within vitrines or existing architectural structures, de Waal suffuses his arrangements with a lyrical quality, equating them to a kind of visual poetry. The Porcelain Room (2002), a major architectural intervention inspired by porcelain rooms from 18th-century Europe, saw the artist placing 650 porcelain vessels on wall-mounted shelves and within floor crevices to create a powerful, immersive encounter. In The library of exile (2019), a pavilion erected as part of his exhibition coinciding with the 58th Venice Biennale, de Waal applied his craft of arrangement onto 2,000 books by exiled writers across the globe, both historical and contemporary.
The artist obtained his BA in English Literature at the University of Cambridge, and was a Senior Research Fellow in Ceramics at the University of Westminster, London, United Kingdom in 2002. His work is held in major collections including the Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Museum für Angewandte Kunst, Frankfurt; Museum of Arts and Design, New York; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Museum Voorlinden, Wassenaar; Museum of Western Australia, Perth; National Museum of Scotland, Edinburgh; Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam; and Victoria & Albert Museum, London.
Notable solo exhibitions include their bright traces (2022), Gana Art Center, Seoul; The Hare With Amber Eyes (2021), Jewish Museum, New York; Letters à Camondo (2021), Musée Nissim de Camondo, Paris; tacet (2020) New Art Centre, Salisbury; library of exile (2019), Japanisches Palais, Dresden; library of exile (2019), British Museum, London; white island (2018), Museum of Contemporary Art, Ibiza; white (2015), Royal Academy, London; Signs & Wonders (2009), Victoria & Albert Museum, London; and Porcelain Room (2002), Geffrye Museum, London. The artist has also participated in major international festivals including Symphony of All the Changes (2023), 7th Guangzhou Triennial and 53rd Faenza Ceramic Biennale (2003).
de Waal had his residency at the STPI Workshop in 2024.