One of England’s most famous potters—and the author of the surprise bestseller The Hare with Amber Eyes—makes his American debut today at Gagosian Gallery. He talks to Iain Millar about the writing and potting life—and his next book on the color white.“Being trapped by genre is pathetic,” says Edmund de Waal. Given what he’s done, it’s hard to take issue.
His book The Hare with the Amber Eyes, a record of the travels of a collection of tiny Japanese Netsuke carvings in the hands of family members, enduring fortune and folly across Europe and Japan over three centuries, sold by the truckload and won a shelf of awards. By then he had confirmed his position as one of the leading ceramic artists of his generation, exhibiting at the best museums and selling to the pickiest collectors. His art has brought him to New York, where he’s been signed up by Larry Gagosian for his first US show at the gallery on Madison Avenue.
He’s been making pots since he was five and now he’s 48 or thereabouts. For a long time these have been mostly white or very nearly so, simple in form and mostly arranged in multiples displayed in cabinets and vitrines, often juxtaposed with other objects in unconventional settings, the roof of a museum gallery, say, or in the elaborately decorated rooms of a country house. And he’s even working on a new book about the color white.
On a blisteringly hot day in mid-summer, in his cool, nearly all-white studio next to a bus depot in the dusty, unlovely south-London neighborhood of West Norwood, he explained why his pottery and his writing are part of the same process, why art fairs aren’t good for his skin and pondered what it might be like to be in the movies.
Looking at the space around us, there’s an air of calm and solitude and monkishness and Zen, but in recent years you’ve been right in the spotlight. Are you comfortable with that?
No. But I’m grown up enough to know that I have to deal with it. When Isaac Bashevis Singer won the Nobel Prize he was doorstepped the next day in this little Yiddish cafe where he always drank and he was asked: “Mr Singer, are you surprised?” And he said: “How long can a man be surprised?” I’d much prefer to be quieter because you can’t actually work with intensity with a lot of noise and interruption. You can’t look carefully, you can’t think carefully, you can’t write carefully. But the last few years have also brought a lot of extraordinary things, so I’m not unhappy.
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