Answer to an enquiry is a characteristic installation piece by the acclaimed ceramicist and author Edmund de Waal. A plywood cabinet with twelve shelves is populated by an arrangement of shallow circular vessels, which are grouped together concentrically with a smaller pink dish placed within a larger green one. Each shelf has either six or seven groupings of pots. The colouring of the vessels is delicate and subtle, and each one has a lightness owing to the material’s translucency. Although they conform to a type, being shallow and circular, each vessel has a subtly individualised shape resulting from hand-throwing on a potter’s wheel. De Waal throws each pot himself by hand and is widely regarded as the leading practitioner of studio pottery techniques in the contemporary art world.

De Waal’s preferred medium is porcelain, a notoriously capricious ceramic that requires high firing temperatures (above 1300 Celsius). The vessels in Answer to an enquiry are all porcelain and their thinness is a bravura demonstration of the potter’s craft. Any unevenness in the throwing of a vessel can cause it to fail during kiln firing. The precise arrangement of the vessels is essential to de Waal’s conception and he takes several measures to ensure the consistent arrangement of his installation pieces. In the case of Answer to an enquiry, the underside of each vessel is numbered, a diagram provides instructions about the placement of each pot, and the whole is accompanied by photographic ‘documentation’ of an installation carried out by de Waal himself.

The use of plywood for the display cabinet in Answer to an enquiry is a significant material decision in the context of de Waal’s other work. The use of a woodgrain finish distinguishes this work from comparable works made at the time and since. De Waal has tended to use cabinets and vitrines made from highly refined materials including lacquered and glazed aluminium, in which a uniformly smooth surface emphasises the subtle irregularities of the pots. By contrast, Answer to an enquiry uses the natural buff colouring and open grain of plywood to contrast against the smoothness, brilliance and facture of the porcelain.

The title ‘Answer to an enquiry’ suggests how de Waal uses his ceramic installations as allusions to a world beyond the literal material qualities of his art. In his imaginative handling of studio pottery, ceramic vessels overflow with connotations. They can formulate the ‘answer’ to an unknown ‘enquiry’. The title refers specifically to a text by the abstract painter Agnes Martin, also entitled Answer to an Enquiry:

"My formats are square, but the grids never are absolutely square; they are rectangles, a little bit off the square, making a sort of contradiction, a dissonance, though I didn’t set out to do it that way. When I cover the square surface with rectangles, it lightens the weight of the square, destroys its power."

Martin’s words resonate with de Waal’s practice of organising pots in cabinets. Like Martin, de Waal is also interested in destroying ‘the weight of the square’ (the rectilinear display case). Unlike her, he does this with arrangements of subtly varied, hand-turned ceramic vessels.

Martin was Canadian and de Waal’s work Answer to an enquiry was made specifically to be displayed in Canada at the Gardiner Museum, Toronto. It was exhibited as part of a small display of de Waal’s recent work, which coincided with a lecture he gave at the museum in 2011. The Gardiner Museum is dedicated to ceramics and de Waal later held a larger display there, Edmund de Waal: Rhythm in White, which took place in 2016/17.

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De Waal took an undergraduate degree in English literature and his work is freighted with literary allusions. So much is apparent in the catalogue for his solo exhibition at Alan Cristea in 2012, a thousand hours, in which a story by Colm Tóibín was published. The story, titled ‘The Arrangement’, is written in the voice of an unidentified first-person narrator, who is associated with a nameless person who arranges pots aboard a ship. Some similarity between the activities of this character and de Waal is evident:

"[…] I saw him watching the table, studying the arrangements of the pots. […] I watched him begin to move the pots, and whatever power he now had it included the power to render me immobile. Had I been able to move I would have slowly placed all the pots back in the box, although I was warned never to do this until the wind was up. […] Now it was my turn to smile as I watched him arrange the pots, moving one sideways, another just a small amount to the left or right so that it stood alone. A great deal was at stake. […] As I watched him attempt to find the right alignments, using everything he knew, I noted not only his guarded panic, but my own. He was moving near a right arrangement."

The titles of de Waal’s work relate to the arcane, overwrought titles used by Young British Artists in the nineties and since. His solo exhibition at Alan Cristea a thousand hours echoes Damien Hirst’s seminal work A Thousand Years, in which a black-framed vitrine frames the migration of flies from birth to death. The presentation of de Waal’s work in immaculate cabinetry, including plywood shelving and glazed aluminium cases, bears comparison to Hirst’s use of vitrines, which was derived in turn from Jeff Koons. There is a close similarity between de Waal’s use of tightly packed consecutive shelves and Hirst’s, although the latter fills his shelves not with pottery but pharmaceutical products or stubbed-out cigarette butts.