Edmund de Waal

door into the dark, 2022, Porcelain, marble, gold, aluminium and glass, 21 x 92.7 x 10.2 cm; Photo: Stephen White & Company

‘Across the Porcelain of Evening’

Commentary by Laura Popoviciu

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‘A title is a sort of letter of promise in a pocket’, writes Edmund de Waal (2014: 214). Entitled door into the dark, this work anticipates an encounter with something promised. And it unfolds gently like a five-page letter.

Contained within wall-mounted vitrines, black porcelain vessels dance around ebony coloured marble and golden tablets. Within this display lie pauses, rhythms, longings, repetitions, silences, breaths, hesitations. Should we continue? How can we go on? Do you not know that…? What then?

Such rhetorical questions also form the basis of chapter 6 of Paul’s letter to the Romans where the apostle guides his hearers on a journey from death to resurrection with Christ—just as de Waal’s porcelain (as dark as a midsummer night’s sky) yields to the inspiriting disclosure of gold.  

How do we make the transition from sin to grace?

For de Waal, letting objects be in the shadows is essential. By observing how shadows move around objects and have the power to transform them, darkness itself is redemptively active.

Once filled, each shadowy vitrine becomes a space for contemplation. And as our eyes move around the work, we ourselves, in viewing it, become a little like the raw material from which its vessels are made: first formless; then taking on a multitude of shapes before the potter at the wheel. Gently kneaded clay, lightly touched by the artist’s hands, washed by water like a baptism. For this mysterious process of transformation to reach completion, the shaped clay must be placed into the kiln, while the artist begins a vigil of waiting.

Made in 2022, door into the dark was part of an exhibition at Waddesdon Manor, UK, whose title was inspired by a line from ‘The Eighth Duino Elegy’ by Rainer Maria Rilke: we live here, forever taking leave (Mitchell 1989: 197). Perhaps there is hope in this transient presence: a ‘letter of promise’ in the pockets of our hearts. The discreetly placed golden tablets lend an aura to the vessels which could be an intimation of glory.

‘The bat quivers across the porcelain of evening’, Rilke concludes (ibid: 195). In doing so, it stirs the very air which the golden morning light will eventually pierce. It is into this state of complete stillness and darkness, like a vigil during the Easter liturgy, that Paul’s letter also speaks, reminding us that Christ’s death is a promise of resurrection.

 

References

Conversation with Edmund de Waal, February 2024

De Waal, Edmund. 2014. Edmund de Waal (London: Phaidon)

______. 2019. psalm (Venice: Jewish Museum and Ateneo Veneto)

______. 2022. we life here forever taking leave, exhibition leaflet (Waddesdon: Waddesdon Manor)

Mitchell, Stephen (ed). 1989. The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke (New York: Vintage International Edition)

See full exhibition for Romans 6

Romans 6

Revised Standard Version

6 What shall we say then? Are we to continue in sin that grace may abound? 2By no means! How can we who died to sin still live in it? 3Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? 4We were buried therefore with him by baptism into death, so that as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might walk in newness of life.

5 For if we have been united with him in a death like his, we shall certainly be united with him in a resurrection like his. 6We know that our old self was crucified with him so that the sinful body might be destroyed, and we might no longer be enslaved to sin. 7For he who has died is freed from sin. 8But if we have died with Christ, we believe that we shall also live with him. 9For we know that Christ being raised from the dead will never die again; death no longer has dominion over him. 10The death he died he died to sin, once for all, but the life he lives he lives to God. 11So you also must consider yourselves dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus.

12 Let not sin therefore reign in your mortal bodies, to make you obey their passions. 13Do not yield your members to sin as instruments of wickedness, but yield yourselves to God as men who have been brought from death to life, and your members to God as instruments of righteousness. 14For sin will have no dominion over you, since you are not under law but under grace.

15 What then? Are we to sin because we are not under law but under grace? By no means! 16Do you not know that if you yield yourselves to any one as obedient slaves, you are slaves of the one whom you obey, either of sin, which leads to death, or of obedience, which leads to righteousness? 17But thanks be to God, that you who were once slaves of sin have become obedient from the heart to the standard of teaching to which you were committed, 18and, having been set free from sin, have become slaves of righteousness. 19I am speaking in human terms, because of your natural limitations. For just as you once yielded your members to impurity and to greater and greater iniquity, so now yield your members to righteousness for sanctification.

20 When you were slaves of sin, you were free in regard to righteousness. 21But then what return did you get from the things of which you are now ashamed? The end of those things is death. 22But now that you have been set free from sin and have become slaves of God, the return you get is sanctification and its end, eternal life. 23For the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.

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