de Waal (1)

Went with E to see the exhibition at Kettle's Yard. I knew nothing about de Waal: what follows are crude first impressions.

The first piece you see right by the gallery door is 'A Change in the Weather' - a large frame of shelves with small cylindrical jars lined up along them. Packed close, but each stands in its own space. They are no more than 3" high at most. Made of thin porcelain, pinched at the rim to make it even thinner, their dimensions vary, and none of them is straight. They lean, fingered and dented, impressed by a rectangular tool - each touched, individual. And the colours range from deathly white, through palest greys and blues, to steel, with glazes dull or high, and they sit there on their thick shelves each in their allotted station, the sizes and colours seemingly randomly arranged. The title suggests English skies. It's all muted, subtle. Though the range from darkest to palest is wide, and sometimes similar colours sit together and sometimes not, the overall effect is to average it out. It looks so random it must have been carefully considered.

We can't see inside the pots, we can only imagine the care and difficulty of wrapping, transporting, unwrapping, arranging. I imagine gallons of bubblewrap. I imagine each pot with a numbered sticker underneath. I wonder if they get dusted. I like them: their individuality, their collectiveness, their insistence on a different same. I like the changing colours, the misshapenness, the 'chosen' air of each with its own touchmarks. I like that their function is to stimulate thought and response, though they are suggestive of measures of things, shot-glasses, rations.

I wonder what the title means, whether I'm supposed to think of anything but the sky and the grey light of England under cloud. Whether it's a celebration of plenitude, amplitude, sufficiency. It doesn't seem to be about excess: it is restraint. The shelving, being thick, seems to emphasise this. It could have been thinner; it could have been wood, rather than painted white. Both E and I think of Morandi, and 'arte povera'. It seems to work within the same register of restraint.

What I don't notice is that there are twelve shelves, that the first has 31 containers, the second 28 and so on. There is one for each day of the year. Yes, it is enough.


Examples of Edmund de Waal's work here: NewArtCentre