no speaking is left in me is a ceramic installation that alludes to a wide range of ideas, writings and ceramic traditions. The title quotes from the work of the ancient Greek poet Sappho. Edmund de Waal is foremostly a skilled and imaginative studio potter, and this work—using various textures and hues of black and brown glaze—adapts traditional methods including reflective ‘oil-spot glazes’ that suggest twelfth- and thirteenth-century ‘blackware’ of the Song dynasty and Song-inspired stoneware studio pottery by Bernard Leach. Each ceramic in the installation was turned on a wheel by de Waal. The tall slender pots have become one of the personal trademarks of his art; they well suggest de Waal’s outstanding technical ability, owing to the fragility of their shape and finesse, as well as his exceptionally long fingers, which permit him to create such deep hollows. The ensemble is precisely arranged on an open-sided aluminium shelf, enclosed at the top, of a kind that de Waal used between 2012 and 2014.

The title of this work comes from Fragment 31 by Sappho. De Waal’s source was the authoritative translation by Anne Carson:

He seems to me equal to the gods that man
whoever he is who opposite you
sits and listens close
to your sweet speaking

and lovely laughing—oh it
puts the heart in my chest on wings
for when I look at you, a moment, then no speaking
is left in me

no: tongue breaks, and thin
fire is racing under skin and in eyes no sight and drumming
fills ears

and cold sweat holds me and shaking
grips me all, greener than grass
I am and dead—or almost
I seem to me.

In his art, writing and public speaking, de Waal has recourse to a wide, often eclectic range of textual sources. In a publication to accompany the installation of his work atmosphere at Turner Contemporary in 2014, he variously referenced Virginia Woolf’s essay On Being Ill (1926); Dr Johnson’s dictionary; the cloud classifications of Jean-Baptiste Lemarck (1802); some remarks of J.M.W. Turner, John Constable and John Ruskin; wind gods in Greek mythology; Essay on the Modifications of Clouds by Luke Howard (1803); verse by Goethe, Baudelaire and Wordsworth; and so on. Such inclusions suggest the process of sustained research by which de Waal develops his installations. Works such as no speaking is left in me are not singular; they relate to a rich creative universe, the tapestry of the artist’s searching imagination, and can often be related—both formally and thematically—to other works of a similar date. In formal terms, no speaking is left in me is particularly close to other ensembles of black-glazed ceramics arranged on aluminium shelves, including less than light (2012), which uses the same blend of pots and plates in a horizontal, single-shelf format.

De Waal’s work is at once thematically complex and formally elemental. This unusual compound has widened his popularity and made the work relevant to a variety of cultural discourses. Sarah Anderson, author of The Lost Art of Silence, has discussed de Waal’s work in relation to silence:

'He actively thinks about how to make silence—when he is making a bowl, he is making “silence” […]. Much poetry goes into de Waal’s silent pots: “My life is full of silences,” he says, and he refers to both poets and painters who help him achieve this silence, including Paul Celan (whose poetry focuses on the silence of annihilation); Wallace Stevens’s The House Was Quiet and the World Was Calm; Osip Mandelstam’s “When on the squares and in solitary silence, We slowly go out of our minds”; Sappho, “For when I gaze at you fleetingly, I can no longer utter a sound,” and Proust.'

In de Waal’s imaginative handling of studio pottery, ceramic vessels overflow with connotations. He frequently conceives of his ceramic installations as metaphors, with literary titles implying not merely a poetic handling of his material but rather a like-for-like conception of the ceramic installation as if it were in fact a poem or some other text. A metaphor cannot be paraphrased, and de Waal’s work often conveys its meaning by allusion—pointing outwards to sources of poetry or prose that contain analogous ideas. (His work your hand full of hours (2013) quotes from a poem by Paul Celan, among many other direct quotations from prose, verse and artists’ writings.) An installation of de Waal’s is never obviously symbolic or representational, and the formal qualities of his work—rich with variations of glaze, thickness, shape, arrangement—are indebted to a personal idiom. But his framework, arranging ceramic vessels in partially enclosed cabinets, has proved itself highly flexible and capable of conveying a wide variety of ideas and preoccupations.

One of de Waal’s favoured metaphors for describing his ceramic vessels is that of spoken words or breaths. ‘So you make a small vessel—a pot—out of white clay—no more than a few breaths, a few moves of fingers and hand’. Describing the emergence of a pot spun on the potter’s wheel, de Waal writes of how ‘the walls grow taller and the volume changes like an exhalation, something being said.’ (The works between two breaths and word for word are telling in this regard.) The metaphor often extends to include notions of exhalation and time passing, as if each vessel were a measure of moments passing or expired. (Consider a work such as a thousand hours.) Works such as no speaking is left in me and the origins of silent reading are the corollary to de Waal’s interest in speech and breathing. They address literary qualities of speechlessness and of feelings beyond words.

The subtext for no speaking is left in me is a concern with formal absence, especially the hollow volumes contained by each vessel and the spaces between them. Such absences are carefully weighted and, as the title may imply, they relate to a wordless state. In a talk entitled ‘Making Silence’, given at Kings Place, London, in 2019, de Waal explained his admiration for Sappho:

'There’s an incredibly beautiful group of fragments that Sappho did. They’re stunning, […] beautiful. They’re Sappho’s response to the Iliad. But it’s not as long as the Iliad—it’s three pages of Sappho. And they’re all about return. And because it’s Sappho it is a woman’s feeling about return, rather than a hero. Because they’re fragments there’s lots and lots of space around them. And because so much of my life I’ve been dealing with ideas of return and diaspora and exile, I was trying to find a way of bringing my pots—my vessels—into some kind of space where I could think about return.'