Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Desert Island Discs
Presented by Kirsty Young
An artist and writer acclaimed for his porcelain ceramics and the book 'The Hair with Amber Eyes'.
Eight records
This is the one now. [...] But it was the swing in two And it's a hit too. So we try to do Maconia. [...] That's where 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's about and what I do is about.
Im Abendrot (from Four Last Songs)
This is Strauss's 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 Netsuke, absolutely loved. And so this is music that takes me to Vienna, it takes me to them, it takes me to conversations.
Collegium Regale (Nunc Dimittis)
This is beautiful because this is my childhood. This is the choir in Lincoln Cathedral. [...] You have to imagine growing up next to the most beautiful cathedral and that experience of walking to school through a cathedral, as empty spaces, and then hearing voices.
This is my student years, this is the man in the suit, this is music and the joy of being at Cambridge.
It's because on a road trip on our honeymoon, Sue and I were 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.
Knee Play 1 (from Einstein on the Beach)
[Philip Glass's] wonderful six-hour opera. [...] You're allowed to do it. You're encouraged by Philip Glass to come and go.
But Who May Abide (from Messiah)
My favourite bit from Handel's Messiah, and it's the extraordinary bit when suddenly there's this line about the refiner's fire, about one thing being turned into another people, but obviously for me, objects.
Herr, unser Herrscher (from St John Passion)Favourite
Performer not specified (Bach's St John Passion)
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 res and resolution and finding space.
The keepsakes
The book
The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens
Wallace Stevens
He's an amazing American poet, and I just I come back to them all the time.
In conversation
Presenter asks
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 um 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 of something I'm writing. And they all happen in 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 i juggling, yes, but but it doesn't feel demanding in in that sense of having to make choices the whole time.
Presenter asks
Can you explain to me a little bit about the importance of things? … Potentially an unfashionable thing to promote, this idea that we have a connection to bits and bobs that are quite valuable.
What you're 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 round the world. But as they move round 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 Netscape, 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.
The recording
Timestamps play the recording from that turn
Presenter
Hello, I'm Kirsty 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.
Presenter
For more information about the programme, please visit bbc.co.uk/slash radio four.
Presenter
My castaway this week is the artist and writer Edmund Duvall. 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 Hair 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. So as somebody who is recognised in both fields at a high level, then, how do you juggle the writing and the ceramics?
Edmund de Waal
It doesn't feel like a juggling act at all. It's really very odd to say this, but um 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 of something I'm writing. And they all happen in 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 i juggling, yes, but but it doesn't feel demanding in in that sense of having to make choices the whole time.
Presenter
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.
Edmund de Waal
Well, rigorous, yes, because I mean, for goodness' sake, I've spent almost forty years making these things now, and they are rigorous. You know, 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, you know, at their heart, they are simple, fragile porcelain objects which fit in your hand. I mean, they've they've got the mark of the person who made them, and it's just clay and a hand, and that's all actually it is. So they are humane. Rigorous but humane. I I I want that on my gravestone first of all.
Presenter
Vicarious.
Presenter
And they they have a real sort of artistic purity to them. And as I understand it, they are made in a studio that you know you have to go down a bit of a grubby old track to get to, and there's a bookies and a a car r repair workshop next to you. It's not exactly where I would imagine these objects of pure and rare beauty coming out of. Well, not grand. I mean
Edmund de Waal
But the thing is that you come to the studio however way you come to your studio, you come to your desk however 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?
Presenter
Let's have some music, then, Edmund. What are we going to hear first of all today?
Edmund de Waal
We're hearing Ella Fitzgerald Mack the Knife.
Presenter
Now you've been very particular about the recording you want, which we love in our customers, but tell us.
Edmund de Waal
I can't tell us.
Presenter
But waiting here.
Edmund de Waal
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.
Speaker 4
Aww, what's the next chorus?
Speaker 4
Do this song now.
Speaker 4
This is the one now.
Speaker 4
I don't know.
Speaker 4
But it was the swing in two And it's a hit too.
Speaker 4
So we try to do Maconia.
Presenter
That was Ella Fitzgerald with her own interpretation there of Mac the Knife. You were enjoying that, Edmund.
Edmund de Waal
How can you not love that? I mean that's good but that's improvisation, you see. That's where 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's about and what I do is about.
Presenter
Let's talk for a minute then about the subject that is central to your book, The Hair with Amber Eyes, which is the the Netsky. That's how you say it, isn't it? Netsky. They're these well, you describe what they are. I mean, they look to me to be.
Edmund de Waal
That's how you say it, isn't it?
Edmund de Waal
Yeah, I mean they look
Presenter
I didn't deal with
Edmund de Waal
Best.
Edmund de Waal
I didn't dare hope that you would have one. That's a rat.
Presenter
And this is carved in what?
Edmund de Waal
That's ivory seventeen eighty by a carver of rats with beautiful black inlaid eyes.
Presenter
Are you
Presenter
Right.
Edmund de Waal
They're toggles. They hold a little bag from your belt which goes around your kimono. And they're all completely different.
Presenter
So they might be, for example, this is a tiny rat, it might be two people wrestling, it might be.
Edmund de Waal
Yeah, some of them are a little bit more disturbing. That's the woman in her bath.
Presenter
Whatever sounds.
Presenter
Ah, yes, and that really is rather detailed. And very, very beautiful. So you inherited a collection of how many of these Netsky?
Edmund de Waal
Lady
Edmund de Waal
264 of them. I was given them by this very marvellous great uncle of mine, my great uncle Iggy, who I loved, who lived in Tokyo, who was an elderly Jewish émigré. 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. And if you don't do something about it,
Presenter
Hello.
Edmund de Waal
You're going to s end your life having failed.
Presenter
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 for an artist.
Presenter
Potentially an unfashionable thing to promote, this idea that we have a connection to, well, you know, bits and bobs that are quite valuable.
Edmund de Waal
Valuable. What you're 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 round the world. But as they move round 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 Netscape, 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.
Presenter
So ancient and so beautiful, and I I'm 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.
Presenter
Will you tell me how much they're worth?
Edmund de Waal
No, because that's a mistake. You know, a, because of course I'll never sell them. They they they go on their journey th through my children. But the other thing is that um the money thing around objects is is actually completely inconsequential to me. Value is is is elsewhere.
Presenter
I just hope your trousers don't have any holes in the pocket. They're so beautiful and precious. Time for some more music, Edmund. What are we going to hear today?
Edmund de Waal
Yes
Edmund de Waal
We can hear from Four Last Songs by Strauss im Abenbrut. This is Strauss's 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 Netsuke, absolutely loved. And so this is music that takes me to Vienna, it takes me to them, it takes me to conversations.
Speaker 4
Tonight once for all
Speaker 4
See ya.
Presenter
That was Renee Fleming singing Strauss's Im Ardendrot. You were born then Edmund Duvall in nineteen sixty four, and you are in your own words I'm quoting directly here the son of left wing guardian reading Anglican parents. What were the early days like?
Edmund de Waal
Yeah.
Edmund de Waal
What were the
Edmund de Waal
Oh, they're fantastic. The first memories are of Nottingham campus, where my mum, who's a historian, was teaching in the sixties and my father was chaplain. I remember sixty eight. I remember the Free University of Nottingham.
Presenter
Those were protests.
Edmund de Waal
Oh, absolutely. I remember the bonfires and the slogans, uh, No War But Class War. Big, big poster. Fantastic. So early radical memories. And then we moved to Lincoln where my dad became Chancellor of the Cathedral there.
Presenter
What do you think?
Presenter
So you're one of four boys. That was a
Edmund de Waal
Yeah, I'm the third of four.
Presenter
Four boys in five years
Edmund de Waal
And she blooming wrote a book during those years.
Presenter
Your mother gave birth to
Presenter
Thank you.
Edmund de Waal
I don't know. She's pretty tough. She's a stalwart woman. She writes, she travels all the time. It was a busy household, inevitably, of course, lots of people. It was a very, very noisy household. I mean, it was a huge, vast house with kind of a chapel and a spiral staircases and stuff. But there were always dozens of people coming in and meals and theatre and music happening in the house. I'm not romanticising it. It was a very remarkable experience to be part of that community, really.
Presenter
What is it on?
Presenter
Because of that.
Presenter
And you were a little brain box, weren't you? Little smarty pants.
Edmund de Waal
You were very capable in school.
Edmund de Waal
My brothers are more capable than me. I mean, come on, my parents blessed and said, thank God he's good with his hands. So.
Edmund de Waal
I'm not having that. I'm yeah, yeah, I love but we all read and like yes, books were important.
Presenter
I'm wondering, your mother having four boys in five years, where did she find the space and the peace to write a book?
Edmund de Waal
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 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, that she just used to completely invent the time we went to bed.
Presenter
I really like the sound of your section.
Edmund de Waal
Yeah, that's huge.
Presenter
Uh when did you first uh throw a pot? Is that it?
Edmund de Waal
I was five and 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 pottery 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? It's alive. That's the extraordinary thing about clay is it moves and this bizarre thing
Presenter
Mm.
Presenter
But like
Edmund de Waal
But where there was no space you created a volume.
Edmund de Waal
And I made it and I loved it, I loved it. And then the nice woman there said, paint it some nice bright colours. And I said, No, it's white, I want a white pot. So my first pot was white and so I was set in my forty God knows how many years of making white pots. What white does allowed this thing to have a presence, more presence than if I had tried to paint flowers on it.
Presenter
You've
Edmund de Waal
I knew it, I knew it, I knew it, I knew it, I knew it. So that was it. I knew.
Presenter
I think it's a good idea.
Edmund de Waal
That I was going to be a potter.
Presenter
Do you get the same sensation now as you got when you were five when you do that?
Edmund de Waal
I get joy, I get that absolute sense of this this being a really very very sane thing to do.
Edmund de Waal
Um I'm happier when I'm making than when I'm writing. The sitting down at the wheel is still more core for me than the pen.
Presenter
Let's have some music. It's your third of the day. What are we gonna hear?
Edmund de Waal
Well, this is beautiful because this is my childhood. This is the choir in Lincoln Cathedral.
Edmund de Waal
You have to imagine growing up next to the most beautiful cathedral and that experience of walking to school through a cathedral, as empty spaces, and then hearing voices. I mean, it's it's amazing.
Speaker 4
He can't show the end with his own
Edmund de Waal
And we're
Speaker 4
He has stand, He has gathered up, He hath witnessed us from their seats.
Speaker 4
This is all mortality.
Speaker 4
He was feeling at all.
Speaker 4
Oh Jesus adventure.
Presenter
Lincoln Cathedral Choir, singing Collegium Regale from the Nunc Dimitus by Herbert Howells. So then, Edmund Duval, you 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 twelve when that happened. And you met a man called Geoffrey Whiting.
Speaker 4
Something that happened.
Speaker 4
Uh
Edmund de Waal
Yeah.
Presenter
And he was a
Edmund de Waal
Important 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 twelve I was there every day.
Presenter
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 twelve their head gets turned by all sorts of other distractions. Yours didn't. I didn't. I mean
Edmund de Waal
What I realized 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 thirty thousand pots you make are the worst, and then it gets easier. Right. Was he right? He was right. I think thirty or forty thousand 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 then I'd break them all up.
Presenter
Rise.
Edmund de Waal
And start again on Monday. And that was the way you learn to throw.
Presenter
I'm breaking them all.
Edmund de Waal
Follow up is is an important or as important
Presenter
Part of the process is making them issue.
Edmund de Waal
Part of the process is making them. Well, it is. It's about letting go and moving on. It's unusual because it's pottery, but but if you were talking to a musician, that would have ev ec complete resonance. They'd say, of course, of course it takes years to learn how to do that.
Presenter
And now, when you're making your beautiful and highly collectible pieces, what do you do with the ones that don't go?
Edmund de Waal
What do you do?
Edmund de Waal
Well that I'm not sure. 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.
Presenter
But I think it's a good idea.
Presenter
Do you not just give them to friends and I mean, I'm sure they're quite beautiful, the ones you break up.
Edmund de Waal
The the problem I'm giving to friends is then they turn up in auction houses. So you know, however dear the friends. So no, no, no, things get things get broken. Is it difficult to break something? No, it's joyful. I mean, the sound of breaking porcelain is a wonderful, wonderful sound.
Speaker 4
Yeah.
Presenter
Uh
Presenter
So you were a qui I know you're you're 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.
Edmund de Waal
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 Iggy 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 who 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, Geoffrey's tradition, was the Leech tradition. It was this tradition instituted by this man called Bernard Leach, 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, but still there, Leech Pottery. And so his tradition, which was English pottery meets Japan. That was the tradition in which I was learning.
Presenter
The year that you spent in Japan, uh y you said that you were an unbelievably poe-faced disciple of some very grumpy pottery masters. It doesn't sound like a bundle of us.
Edmund de Waal
disciple of some very
Edmund de Waal
It doesn't sound
Edmund de Waal
Oh, it was terrible. It was terrible. But that was my expectation. You see, I'd I'd gone to sit at the feet of of masters. And so the the more grumpier and the more miserable they were and the m the more lowly the tasks I had, the more authentic it felt to me as an experience. I mean I was seventeen for goodness' sake, you know, and so po faced fits.
Presenter
You know
Presenter
Let's have some music, what's next?
Edmund de Waal
And she's rather good This is heaven by talking heads.
Presenter
And why have you chosen?
Edmund de Waal
This is my student years, this is the man in the suit, this is music and the joy of being at Cambridge.
Speaker 3
Everyone is trying.
Speaker 3
Get to the bar.
Speaker 3
Name of the bar
Speaker 3
A bar is called heaven.
Presenter
That was Talking Heads and Heaven from the album Stop Making Sense and memories for you, Edmund Deval, of those heady student days and all the parties that you enjoyed. You you gained not too many parties, obviously, because you gained a first class degree in in English, but you you also gained a wife.
Edmund de Waal
I met Sue at Cambridge, yes. She was studying there, and yes, we've been together f forever.
Presenter
Cambridge.
Presenter
I I mean, it's not everybody that that is a potter. How di how did she take it? I mean, it is a it's quite an unusual thing for a young man to be doing.
Edmund de Waal
The the great thing about pottery is 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.
Presenter
Immediately.
Presenter
Yes, I don't know if it was a mountainside you were looking on, but somewhere very remote, and you were making horrible brown sort of stew pots and coffee mugs and things.
Edmund de Waal
But somewhere very remote.
Edmund de Waal
Coffee mugs and things. Which no one wanted. Understandably? They were terrible.
Presenter
Understandable.
Edmund de Waal
I mean, they were quite well made terrible pots. But they were made because that's the tradition in which I'd I'd come. It was it was making pots from someone else's conviction rather than from actually who I was.
Presenter
And the moment at which you found your path, at which you thought, these are the things I want to make, and these are from a different tradition and saying something different, that was the moment that you met extraordinary success.
Edmund de Waal
It was strange. In desperation I moved from my Welsh hillside, I moved and set up again in Sheffield, and that still didn't 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 stonewire clays, these brown grey clays.
Edmund de Waal
And I had to begin again with porcelain. It's a very strange material. It's it's heavy, it's not very plastic, it's difficult to use, but it's beautiful.
Edmund de Waal
And 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
Edmund de Waal
to Chinese porcelains, to German wonderful porcelains, to wedgwood. And what I started to do was to rethink how I made things. So I was beginning to make this porcelain which was covered in celladon, lovely light blue and green glazes and white glazes. But then I started to make them in groups and I put them on the floor and I put them on shelves and I put them in ceilings and I lit them and I put them in shadows and I just started to enjoy this experience of putting pots into buildings in different ways. And that seemed to connect. It connected for me of course'cause I love buildings and I love how you move through buildings. But it also seemed to connect with people.
Presenter
Cool.
Edmund de Waal
Yeah.
Edmund de Waal
Yeah.
Presenter
It seemed to me that that there was this almost overnight success for you. How did that affect you? That must have been quite discombobulating, was it?
Edmund de Waal
It was fantastic. Do you know what? Success overnight. I recommend it to anyone.
Presenter
Yeah.
Edmund de Waal
It was a joy because actually of course I really really really put my years in taking my red van round craft shops trying to get people to look at things and so the idea that actually people would queue in front of an exhibition and buy the stuff was 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.
Presenter
Yeah.
Presenter
Uh time for your fifth piece of music now, Edmund. What are we going to hear and why?
Edmund de Waal
I'm going to hear Mozart's Allaturka, and it's because on a road trip on our honeymoon, Sue and I were in California and we stopped at a petrol garage, a gas station, and there was one C D for sale, and that's the music that was there, and so we played it all the way up California.
Presenter
Mitzko Utah, playing Mozart's Allaturka. You've described Edmund Duval in The Hair 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?
Edmund de Waal
Well, it's a primary sensation. You know, it's obviously 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.
Presenter
Now, when I go and see some of your beautiful, valuable ceramics in in any of the museums that they're displayed in around the world, I'm not allowed to touch them.
Edmund de Waal
No, tough. No, no, you aren't. No, I mean there are there 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 for a museum a couple of years ago, which is for children s 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.
Presenter
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 that?
Edmund de Waal
Oh, they've always been in and out of the studio. And in fact, their primary school has always been in and out of the studio.
Presenter
And what difference do you think that has made to 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 the mud and the dirt. What difference do you think that has made to your children?
Edmund de Waal
Do you know what? They have to write their own memoirs about that. I'm not going to that's their own misery memoir about growing up with a potter dad. I'm not going to call call them on that. But I would say.
Presenter
Okay.
Edmund de Waal
That it is a huge, huge mistake not to allow kids to make a mess. You know, mess is where it starts. It's in the flour 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.
Presenter
And so when you've had uh classes coming into your studio I mean, I I do think of your studio I I haven't been there, but I think of it as being a quite a sort of rarefied environment.
Edmund de Waal
It's terribly rarefied to the middle of the city.
Presenter
Yeah, so we're not terribly wide, but
Edmund de Waal
what they might do to the place.
Presenter
Yeah.
Edmund de Waal
No. The worst that can happen is something gets broken, but the best that can happen is inestimable. Let's have some more music then.
Presenter
Um we're on your sixth.
Edmund de Waal
Yeah. We're going to hear Philip Glass from Einstein on the Beach wonderful six-hour opera.
Presenter
A six hour have you watched it, Olivia? Yeah, it's tremendous. The whole six hours you've watched.
Edmund de Waal
Yeah.
Edmund de Waal
But we came and went.
Presenter
Are you alone?
Edmund de Waal
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?
Presenter
Did you remember?
Speaker 4
Screen.
Speaker 4
Four
Speaker 4
Far
Speaker 4
Six, seven.
Speaker 4
John, three.
Speaker 4
Yeah.
Speaker 4
1.
Speaker 4
Toot.
Speaker 4
Yeah.
Speaker 4
5, 6, 5, 1, 2, 6, 3, 4, 5, 6, 6, 6, 1, 7, 2, 1, 2, 3, 3, 3, 2, 7, 3, 4, 2, 5, 2, 3, 4, 4, 4, 6, 4, 3, 6, 8, 1, 6, 6, 7, 3, Frankie.
Speaker 4
Seven, eight, four, five.
Presenter
Philip Glass's Knee Play One. And so for anybody who's read the book, Edmund Valle, they will know in The Hair with Amber Eyes that you tell the story of these things we've been discussing back at the beginning, the Netsky, these beautiful small carved things. And you are now the 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.
Edmund de Waal
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 to me. And so the idea of them being locked away is is is is wrong. They are things to start a conversation with. So I hope that will continue.
Presenter
Um I asked you earlier about the the value of the Netski. They are very, very precious and valuable things. You 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 for making them is is very you know, it's very intellectualized and it's incredibly thoughtful.
Presenter
They are things with a huge price tag, the things that you make. How do you reconcile the idea that that value is not important?
Edmund de Waal
I think your experience of an object can be changed by knowing what it costs.
Presenter
Yeah.
Edmund de Waal
But
Edmund de Waal
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.
Edmund de Waal
None of that is about the money. All of that is about
Edmund de Waal
An experience.
Presenter
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 and A. You know, there aren't great sort of arrows pointing and saying, take a look at these. They're in a place that is almost unknown and unseen.
Edmund de Waal
Almost unknown and unseen. That's a good example,'cause they're eighty feet up in the dome of the V and A, um 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. And the sculpture is how you hold these objects in space.
Presenter
Yes, I mean
Presenter
Be it.
Presenter
Time for some more uh music now. What are we gonna hear, Edmund?
Edmund de Waal
My favourite bit from Handel's Messiah, and it's it's the extraordinary bit when suddenly there's this line about the refiner's fire, about one thing being turned into another people, but obviously for me, objects.
Speaker 4
It is more in his boy. He saw it all
Speaker 4
Ooh, ooh, it is all.
Speaker 4
Oh, my smile will be sniper before.
Speaker 4
Then water said when he are here.
Presenter
That was Sara Mingado singing But Who May Abide from Handel's Messiah? Um 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 them wherever they make them?
Edmund de Waal
Yes, my experience is a peculiar one of this, because of course I spent so much of my life, last few years of my life, on the track of this particular collection of objects and thinking about how objects are held together and how they're dispersed, how things get lost and then found again. And so that whole feeling of objects being perpetually in transit, you can't hold them together, you can't hold things in one place, is 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 off and away. But each installation in some ways 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.
Edmund de Waal
My 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.
Presenter
And y your children, do they you've said that, you know, clay has been a part of their lives and they've spent lots of time in and out of your studio. Do they show um any affinity with their father's profession?
Edmund de Waal
No, not particularly. I would hate them to follow into in what I'm doing. I I just hope that they find their own path.
Presenter
And will you sort of bequeath them collections of your work and say I want, you know, th let it begin its own story with your family?
Edmund de Waal
Yes, yes, I'm 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.
Speaker 4
Why was that?
Edmund de Waal
Why was that? Up to then 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 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.
Presenter
I'm going to be casting you away shortly, of course, Edmund. How do you think you're going to cope with the solitude?
Edmund de Waal
Of course I'm not looking forward to it, but I but I I have some experience of being completely by myself.
Presenter
You think you'll survive?
Edmund de Waal
Um
Edmund de Waal
I'm about the least practical person you can believe possible. Really? Yeah, all I can make it pots, that's it.
Presenter
Bye.
Edmund de Waal
Make a fire? Hopeless. No, th that's it.
Edmund de Waal
Uh
Presenter
Uh
Edmund de Waal
Let's have a This 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 res and resolution and finding space. It's an extraordinary bit of music.
Presenter
Herr Unser Hirscher from Bach's Saint John's Passion. So I'm going to give you a few things now. You get, first of all, Edmund Duval, to take a book, dear island. What book would you like to take?
Edmund de Waal
Thanks for that single book. Well, of course you do have the complete works of Shakespeare and you have the Bible. This was a tough one, obviously. It's going to be the collected poems of Wallace Stevens. He's an amazing American poet, and I just I come back to them all the time.
Presenter
Well, of course you do have the complete works of Shakespeare, you have the Bible.
Presenter
Obviously.
Presenter
How's the name?
Presenter
Right, it's yours and the luxury.
Edmund de Waal
Oh, Espresso maker. I can't live without coffee. Not Bonetsky. Oh God, no. Leave those behind. It's coffee. I've I've got to survive by myself.
Presenter
Right, okay. You can have a a very uh a very good espresso maker and um lifetime supply indeed of coffee. And and the track that you would like to save from the waves.
Edmund de Waal
Yeah.
Edmund de Waal
It's going to be the Bach. The final piece we have today. Yes, it's about being human, that it's just incredible.
Presenter
Okay.
Presenter
The final piece we have today.
Presenter
Emma and Deval, thank you very much for letting us hear your desert island discs.
Edmund de Waal
Yeah.
Presenter
Huge privilege.
Presenter
You've been listening to a download from the BBC. You'll find more information on the Radio Four website bbc.co.uk slash Radio Four.
Presenter asks
You were born in 1964 and you are … the son of left wing Guardian reading Anglican parents. What were the early days like?
Oh, they're fantastic. The first memories are of Nottingham campus, where my mum, who's a historian, was teaching in the sixties and my father was chaplain. I remember sixty eight. I remember the Free University of Nottingham. … I remember the bonfires and the slogans, uh, No War But Class War. … So early radical memories. And then we moved to Lincoln where my dad became Chancellor of the Cathedral there.
Presenter asks
And you were a little brain box, weren't you? Little smarty pants.
My brothers are more capable than me. I mean, come on, my parents blessed and said, thank God he's good with his hands. … I love but we all read and like yes, books were important.
Presenter asks
Do you get the same sensation now as you got when you were five when you [throw a pot]?
I get joy, I get that absolute sense of this this being a really very very sane thing to do. … I'm happier when I'm making than when I'm writing. The sitting down at the wheel is still more core for me than the pen.
Presenter asks
When you're making your beautiful and highly collectible pieces, what do you do with the ones that don't go?
Well that I'm not sure. 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. … No, no, no, things get things get broken. Is it difficult to break something? No, it's joyful. I mean, the sound of breaking porcelain is a wonderful, wonderful sound.
“How can you not love that? I mean that's good but that's improvisation, you see. That's where 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's about and what I do is about.”
“Valuables. What you're 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 round the world. But as they move round 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 Netscape, 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.”
“The first thirty thousand pots you make are the worst, and then it gets easier. … I think thirty or forty thousand possibly.”
“Porcelain … I had to begin again with porcelain. It's a very strange material. It's it's heavy, it's not very plastic, it's difficult to use, but it's beautiful. … And 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.”
“It is a huge, huge mistake not to allow kids to make a mess. You know, mess is where it starts. It's in the flour 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.”