Attic (de Waal 2)

In the next room, there is an installation in the ceiling, like an open trap door. Pots are arranged round the opening as if in a pantry, almost out of sight, but neatly arranged, packed tight... It is called 'Attic' and makes me laugh. It is like that, and not like that. The hidden lives of pots. The pots on the edge of your mind. The higher pots. The unneeded pots. The pots you call down at times of crisis, when great numbers of family arrive for weddings and funerals. They are white, pure, unreachable. We can look up at them from this distance on the ground and desire them. And of course, the word 'attic' conjures Greece and the history of decorated pots, which these are not. They deny decoration, though they have touchmarks. We clothe them with our imaginings, which they shrug off.

On the floor further along is 'Register'. I wasn't taking notes, so this is only a hazy recollection. In two long black containers - again, thick IKEA-ish walls - arranged in close parallel, the pots stand at ground level and we look down into them, their emptiness. Some, if not all, have a very shiny glaze. They fit their trough, though the sizes vary slightly. Again they are whitish, very plain. There is ribbing inside: it's the first time we've been allowed to see inside the pots, but now we can't see their outsides.

Why 'Register'? An account. A list. A calibration. A pitch, a lexicon. A noticing. I can't get it right in my head. They are contained, and withheld from us. They are singled out for attention, and we look at each one: tick, tick, tick. We move round it, seeing how the light plays on them; at one angle it looks as if they are holding water. It is shallow of me, but I think of a trough of plant pots. I'm not thinking of schoolchildren, or types of discourse, or even of pennies dropping, but of geraniums, winter, potting sheds, the smell of the leaves, the texture of them rough on the hand, and how they make your hands smell. I look again at the pots and they are white, innocent, empty.

And I notice how scuffed the floor is, needs stripping and resealing. Or else you can think: it's textured, marked, touched by all the feet of art-lovers, and the reluctant lovers of art-lovers, and the culture-vultures and posers and critics and pilgrims that have passed this way.

On the wall opposite are a pair of cubic cabinets, set up almost like a stereoscope. You can't see both properly at once when you are close to. The exteriors are white, the interior a slightly silky dark sludgy grey/green/blue which reflects a little light. And right in the back of the boxes are more cylindrical pots: tall thin, short fat, white, creamy, pale yellow, some with cracked rims from firing, some - possibly all - marked with a brush of gold. It feels devotional, these are like candles at a shrine, and the gloss of the walls reflects back the ghostly forms of the pots when you get them at an acute angle. As you approach the boxes with your face, they absorb sound; they are a micro-climate. The pots are withdrawn from the world. What is this piece called?

Along the ramp, echoing the movement of the step but way up the wall, is 'Rill'. This seems the least subtle of his titles. It is a run of little pots on a dark shelf, with a step part way along, and the light bubbles off the shiny surfaces and different colours, and it gives a pleasing sense of running water. Again, one longs to touch them, and the title supplies the idea of filling them with water at varying levels, and tapping them for the ringing sound. As I said, I am shallow.