i
Several years ago I had an invitation to make an installation for the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.
The old Ceramics Galleries that stretched along the top floor on the Cromwell Road side of the museum were being renewed. The invitation was very open. Would I respond to the collections? I could be anywhere in these galleries, it could be any scale. I had a year.
When I was a boy I would walk up the stairs and then more stairs. You had to be resourceful to navigate your way through Medieval Metalwork, and not get lost in Enamels. You reached the top. There were very few places that you could see out of or even sense the museum below you, the spaces seemed completely self-contained, one enfilade gallery after another after another. In each direction there were armies of vitrines holding pots. Who would dream of building such high rooms with such spectacular volumes for a cup or a dish or a bowl?
There were very few visitors. Sometimes even the warders were asleep.
The display was regimented by country or epoch. It came from a time before interpretation. You were given a vitrine of Sèvres, or medieval jugs or Lowestoft porcelain and expected to get on with it.
ii
I walked and walked these galleries. And I worked out what I wanted to do. I wanted to be present, but not obtrusive. I drew a red ring on the plans inside the dome. I wanted a red metal shelf of porcelain high up at the point where the curve of the dome sprang from the walls; it should float above the cornice, away from the dome, porcelain held in space.
I wanted it to be a gesture, as easy as a hand on a shoulder.
And if you stood aslant on one of the mosaic circles that make up the floor in the entrance hall – shaking your umbrella, shifting in that moment of coming into a museum, the adjustment to echoey spaces – and looked up at the square aperture in the coffered ceiling, you would see a red arc. And a white smudge of porcelain held 150 feet above you. I called it Signs & Wonders.
iii
The red shelf holds 425 vessels made out of porcelain.
It is my memory palace. I thought of the porcelain in the collections of the museum that I have loved, looked at it again and walked away and sat at my wheel and made my memory of it. It was a kind of distillation, the intensity of the after-image you get from looking at anything hard.
What is left of that garniture of seven porcelain jars when you have looked away?
It feels a long time ago. Putting them so high up was, at one level, simply a way of putting things out of harm’s way. With a high shelf, things don’t get knocked. And I liked the idea of it as a kind of attic, with things in the shadows, as I did at the Geffrye Museum.
But looking back, I was making these pots during the day in my last cramped studio with a small red maquette hanging above my wheel. There were boards of finished pots jumbled up with work ready for me to trim, buckets of porcelain ready for me to throw, and lists on the walls, a calendar with the day of the install ringed in red. That is the day they would close the galleries and board over the aperture and the scaffolding towers would be in place and the thirty-seven-metre powder-coated aluminium shelf brought down from its fabricators in Lancaster and lifted into the museum. All my porcelain had to be ready. There would be hard hats.
And at night I was trying to finish my book about netsuke, about loss, about the way collections fall apart, how memory burns an image of such intensity that you can be 10,000 miles from where you grew up and reconstruct how one object stood next to another, trying to make the circle join up again.
I didn’t know how to end the book. My advance had been spent long ago on research trips to Vienna, Odessa. I’d look at my lists of the places I hadn’t been, the graves that I felt might make something click into place if I went and stood and paced, the notes to check the postmarks on letters from a hundred years before. There must be a cultural history of dust, I wrote.
I handed in my book late.
And a week later at the opening of the Ceramics Galleries, a bemused royal glances up at my installation seventy feet above us and asks me how it will be dusted and have I come far?
I don’t know, Ma’am, I reply to the first question.
And yes, I think, I have.
iv
The red shelf holds three kinds of porcelain.
There are my memories of Chinese pots. There is a whole episode of bowls on stands that have some kind of kinship with Jingdezhen. And secondly there is my conversation with the porcelain from all the factories that spilt out across Europe in the eighteenth century. There are my versions of a Meissen dinner service up there, and garnitures, parts of porcelain room arrangements.
And thirdly there is industry. Because I throw my work on the wheel there are many kinds of vessel that I cannot make. As I wanted porcelain dishes to be part of the shelf I asked for a wide, generous meat dish to be moulded in a factory in Stoke-on-Trent.
Industry which means modernity, seriality, perfection, the run of objects that don’t just approximate to each other, but are each other. It is standardisation, it’s the on and on and on of things in the world. It’s the polar opposite of everything that making pots by hand in a workshop strives for, the warmth and gesture, the judgement that changes from object to object. It is beauty and sublimity and disappearance.
The polar opposite of the handmade. But polar too, in their coldness, their endlessness.
‘I tried to think a lonelier Thing / Than any I had seen – / Some Polar Expiation – An Omen in the Bone / Of Death’s Tremendous Nearness’, wrote Emily Dickinson, her poem sitting jaggedly on the empty white page.
And it is closely allied to revolution. Up there are matt grey cylinders against a fiercely white dish, the graphic sparks of constructivist porcelain from Revolutionary Russia. And there are the graduated run of whites into greys of Bauhaus ceramics from Germany.
This is where I need to go. It is the last part of my journey, revolution, Porcelain 1919.