‘It is how you tell their stories that matters’; #deWaal

Words and objects are inextricably connected in the work of Edmund de Waal. Well known in art circles for his ceramic installations, de Waal became more of a household name three years ago with the publication of his book The Hare with the Amber Eyes. I call this a 'book' because it is neither simply a novel, nor an autobiography, nor the history of a collection, but so many types of narrative rolled into one. De Waal has also recently installed a series of works at CRASSH in Cambridge, where I was lucky enough to hear him speak on Friday. As Andrew Nairne so aptly put it he spoke about 'well, in a way everything', weaving his works, his writing and the netsuke into a discussion of space, time, reflection, and touch.

The Hare tells the story of a collection of 264 Japanese netsuke collected by de Waal's great-great-uncle Charles Ephrussi and passed down through successive generations of the family. The story follows the netsuke as they pass from Belle Époque Paris to Imperial, then republican, then Nazi occupied Vienna, briefly to Tunbridge Wells, to Tokyo, and finally to his own house in London. But it also follows de Waal's historical researches and emotional journey as he traces the history of these small, intricate objects through archives, historic buildings and collections. It is, in one sense, entirely a story of objects, as de Waal evokes the environments in which the netsuke lived, surrounded by Impressionist paintings and renaissance furniture, or the paraphernalia of a French eighteenth-century dressing room, or the golden colours and simple lines of a Japanese interior. Yet, in another sense, the story is all about words, about the ways Charles Ephrussi wrote about art, the way de Waal's Uncle Iggie told stories, the way so many of these real people appeared in contemporary fiction of the day, and the atmospheres of anti-semitic polemic through which both they and the netsuke moved.

Speaking on Friday, de Waal conjured for us how his ceramic installations work like texts, needing to be read both horizontally and vertically. It is the relationships and spaces between them, the structured arrangements, layers, reflections and absences, which give the individual pieces meaning as part of larger installations. De Waal spoke about these as having rhythm, cadence and sound just like words. He also emphasised how he feels art should be an iterative experience for the viewer requiring repeat views to build a response. This struck me as much like the experience both of the netsuke and of the reader of The Hare. It is through his evocations of the netsuke in different spaces, the wealth (both materially and visually) of his family's environments, and the range of emotional responses which he gives us that we come to appreciate their charm. And yet, I found what excited me most in the talk was the moment we saw the netsuke. No pictures of them are included in the book, despite other archival images playing a role. They are visible on a website, but I cannot understand why the reader is not allowed to experience de Waal's words alongside images of the netsuke, within what is such a visual text.

De Waal also constantly returns to questions of touch. He often takes a netsuke with him on his travels, simultaneously comforted and unsettled by the feel of it in his pocket. One of the most evocative scenes in the book, for me, is where we see his grandmother, Uncle Iggie and Aunt Gisela play with the netsuke on the floor of their mother Emmy's Vienna dressing room, the objects taken carefully out of their glass vitrine, for her to weave them a story. I was intrigued, therefore, on Friday, to hear him speak about the importance of experiencing objects 'just out of touch', where response is built in the space between your skin and the surface of the object, essentially in touch denied. But then, de Waal spoke about the process of creating his large installation Signs and Wonders in the dome of the V&A museum as he worked on The Hare, the realisation that he was building a permanent, untouchable piece, as he dealt with the emotions of 'vagabonding' after the invincible netsuke. It seems to me that it is de Waal's words which fill the space between your skin and his ceramics, his elegant, golden prose which keeps you coming back. For, in the end, I think for his own works as much as the netsuke, 'it is how you tell their stories that matters.'