In his book The White Road (2015), Edmund De Waal recounted his love affair with porcelain and the long, fascinating history of the material’s travels and fashioning. It was to Venice that Marco Polo brought the earliest porcelain vessel in the Western hemisphere—and De Waal chased it down here for that book. Porcelain of the purest white remains the primary material out of which he fashions his fragile, luminous vessels, the central components of his installations. To me, these vessels, as well as the square or rectangular shapes of marble and gold leaf in his work, suggest musical notation—setting up a contrapuntal dialogue with the light and the space they inhabit, providing comment or argument, yet invoking a meditative silence, a call to attentiveness.
Source : Edmund de Waal’s Venetian Tableaux
