Edmund de Waal’s ceramic installation jade steps grievance consists of five vessels, a plate and two pieces of alabaster. The arrangement of the ensemble was determined by the artist and recorded in a layout plan. As with all of de Waal’s porcelain, the vessels and plate were hand-thrown by the artist on a pottery wheel. The underside of the plate is gilded, and since it stands upright the space immediately behind is illuminated by warm reflected light, which contrasts with the cool whiteness of the cabinet. The alabaster pieces are rectilinear in contrast to the supple, rounded, hand-formed quality of the ceramics. One is oblong, the other square, and they stand upright behind the porcelain vessels. Their proportions mimic those of the vessels, and their silhouettes create a visual echo or outline around the porcelain. The white background of the display case creates a neutral, immaculate zone against which the colours and textures of de Waal’s installation become more pronounced. The ledge of the display case is shallow and suspends the objects in a tightly framed space. The proportions of the case relative to the objects it contains, approximately 4:1, is a grand format that transports de Waal’s studio pottery to the realm of high art. De Waal’s use of literary glosses further widens the semantic field occupied by his vessels.

The title jade steps grievance derives from the title of a short poem by the celebrated Tang poet Li Po (c. 701–762), who is otherwise known as Li Bo, Li Bai, Li Taibai and, erroneously, as Ezra Pound called him, Rihaku. The poem and its title have been translated with considerable variations. De Waal’s chosen translation comes from Chinese Poetry: An Anthology of Major Modes and Genres edited and translated by Wai-Lim Yip:

Upon the jade steps white dews grow.
It is late. Gauze stockings are dabbled.
She lets down the crystal blind
To watch, glass-clear, the autumn moon.

The same poem was famously translated by Ezra Pound as ‘The Jewel Stairs’ Grievance’ in his collection of poems taken from classical Chinese and Anglo-Saxon sources, Cathay (1915), in which he used a modernist free-verse technique to produce a work as much his own as Li Po’s:

THE jewelled steps are already quite white with
dew,
It is so late that the dew soaks my gauze stockings,
And I let down the crystal curtain
And watch the moon through the clear autumn.

Pound appended the following notes, which provide a terse interpretation of Li Po’s text: ‘Jewel stairs, therefore a palace. Grievance, therefore there is something to complain of. Gauze stockings, therefore a court lady, not a servant who complains. Clear autumn, therefore he has no excuse on account of weather. Also she has come early, for the dew has not merely whitened the stairs, but has soaked her stockings. The poem is especially prized because she utters no direct reproach.’

Pound’s translation has connected the poem with the histories of modernism and of modernist literature, and this was likely one aspect that stimulated de Waal’s interest in the subject. He is a longstanding interpreter of modernism, and his work is strongly inflected with an involved awareness of historical Modernism, of which he is both an admirer and a critic. (The whiteness of de Waal’s porcelain has many registers, for example, and variously connotes the history of porcelain generally and the formal purity and emptied meaning of whiteness in Modernist art.) Yet in the case of jade steps grievance, de Waal decided to separate himself from Pound and the Modernist canon.

The attraction of Wai-Lim Yip’s translation is its authenticity, which affords a keener sense of Li Po’s original Chinese text. A crucial difference between translations is the adjective by which the steps or stairs are described. Almost exclusively among the poem’s translators, Wai-Lim Yip favours a literal translation: ‘jade’. Where Pound used ‘jewelled’, others have preferred a less literal word—’marble’—which similarly registers the sense of cool, dense and beautiful stone. De Waal’s installation also registers the ambivalence of the Chinese word for ‘jade’: the slender square and oblong of stone in jade steps grievance are alabaster, yet they are sufficiently dense and translucent to connote the titular sense of ‘jade’ (or ‘jewelled’, or ‘marble’).

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 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 jade steps grievance 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.

The use of alabaster in jade steps grievance is coterminous with de Waal’s inclusion of plaster blocks, silver, granite, graphite, Cor-Ten steel and other materials in his works, which he began in 2015. In one instance, during the night (2016), de Waal included tin boxes, lead and lead shot. In all cases, the artist seems intent upon a dialogue between his ceramics and the surfaces and textures of the objet trouve. In some cases the chosen materials suggest glazes and finishes for de Waal’s ceramics, while in others they mimic qualities of grit, translucency or density. Besides jade steps grievance, de Waal has used alabaster blocks in large works such as white sail (2016) and small ones such as Lettres de Londres: Sur les Quakers (2016). Along with Paros marble and local Ibizan salt, alabaster played a significant role in de Waal’s exhibition at the Museu d’Art Contemporani d’Eivissa, Ibiza, which was held in the summer of 2018. Several works were displayed on alabaster plinths. A work called in time I included a stack of nine shallow square alabaster blocks. The exhibition provides important context for understanding de Waal’s continued used of alabaster in jade steps grievance.