Special Projects

Why Edmund’s research is interesting to me and relevant to my own research and making practice

His research and writing has a relationship with his making (of pots, of their vitrines their organisation structure and relationship to space in how they’re installed and this responds to the research he’s conducting which can be seen in his making black porcelain for the first time after researching his family history and having an invitation to show work in the gallery that stole his Viennese family’s artwork and possessions – black milk of day break (Celan)…

a process of discovery

It’s personal (the white road lead to his family history)

It’s also storytelling and about unresolved bits of history and also the beauty in it

Of spending time in archives

Of talking to people, of having conversation both in real life and also with the dead as in the case of his book letters to camondo which takes the form of a series of letters addressed to the moise who is long dead but is the man who set up the museum. It asks him questions and tries to intimate a shared understanding of things that he’s gleaned through spending time in the house, through being in the architecture/space, seeing the placement of objects and responding to it 

It takes time. Taking the time to visit the places he’s researching spending time people there and spending time in the buildings the countryside’s 

It shares similar lodestars to mine such as the writings of Paul Celan, Rilke, Cy Twombly, Chinese porcelain, John cage, AS Byatt, Walter Benjamin, Morandi, and Donald Judd

It’s academic in that it’s made more expansive by its relationship to poetry and visual art references above but also it’s based on fieldwork and conversations and is expansive

four plates and a palimpsest mostly about Edmund but also other things like love… (2025)

Transcript

Edmund de Waal is a ceramicist, writer, and researcher whose work bridges disciplines, engaging deeply with history, literature, material culture, and memory. His research is not merely a means to an end but an integral part of his artistic and literary practice, shaping both his physical works and written narratives. De Waal’s methodologies reflect a layered and meticulous approach, weaving together historical inquiry, material investigation, personal narrative, and intertextual dialogue with other thinkers and artists.

1. Historical Excavation: Research as Archaeology

One of de Waal’s primary research strategies is a rigorous engagement with historical sources, treating history as an excavation of lost, forgotten, or overlooked narratives. His critically acclaimed book The Hare with Amber Eyes (2010) exemplifies this approach, tracing the history of a collection of Japanese netsuke through the turbulent socio-political changes of 19th and 20th-century Europe. His research involved combing through archives, letters, photographs, and museum collections, reconstructing familial and cultural histories in an almost forensic manner.

This archaeological method of researching history manifests in his ceramic work as well. In Library of Exile (2019–2020), de Waal collected and arranged over 2,000 books written by exiled authors, creating a site-specific installation that functioned as a repository of displaced knowledge and voices. His research was deeply rooted in understanding the socio-political context of exile and diaspora, and he engaged with historical accounts of banned and lost books, the destruction of libraries, and intellectual displacement.

Notable influences: Walter Benjamin, W.G. Sebald, A.S. Byatt.

2. Material Exploration: Researching through Touch

De Waal’s background as a ceramicist profoundly informs his approach to research, centering on the materiality of objects. He does not simply research ceramics academically; he investigates how they are made, how they feel, how they behave under different conditions. His approach to porcelain, for example, is both historical and haptic.

In The White Road (2015), de Waal embarks on a global research journey tracing the history of porcelain, traveling to China, Germany, and England to engage with the material directly. He studies ancient kilns, factory records, and the physical composition of porcelain itself, considering its alchemical and poetic properties. His research method involves both historical study and hands-on experimentation, embodying the idea that knowledge is acquired through making as much as through reading.

Notable influences: Bernard Leach, Giorgio Morandi, Cy Twombly.

3. Literary Engagement: Text as a Research Field

De Waal’s research process is deeply literary, engaging with texts as both historical documents and aesthetic objects. He studies literature not just for content but for its material form—how text exists on a page, how books function as objects, how language carries weight. His influences range from classical literature to contemporary poetry, and his own writing style reflects an intense engagement with rhythm, cadence, and the physicality of words.

His research into language manifests in how he composes his books, borrowing techniques from poetry and minimalist prose. The short, lyrical passages in The White Road and The Hare with Amber Eyes suggest an affinity with poets like T.S. Eliot and Rainer Maria Rilke, who explore fragmentation and memory in their work. His research often leads him to archives and libraries, where he studies marginalia, handwritten letters, and inscriptions, considering the ways in which text itself carries historical residue.

Notable influences: John Ruskin, Roland Barthes, A.S. Byatt.

4. Personal Memory and Narrative as Research

While de Waal is deeply invested in historical and material research, his approach is also autobiographical. He uses personal memory and family history as primary research materials, treating them with the same rigor as he does historical archives. His family’s Jewish heritage, their forced migrations, and their collections of art and objects become subjects of extensive research and artistic exploration.

Memory, for de Waal, is not just an abstract theme but a methodology—he reconstructs stories from fragmented recollections, interviews family members, and retraces ancestral movements. This method is evident in The Hare with Amber Eyes, where he juxtaposes personal stories with broader historical narratives, using his family’s collection of netsuke as a lens through which to study cultural displacement and loss.

Notable influences: Marcel Proust, Sigmund Freud, Jacques Derrida.

5. Spatial and Architectural Considerations in Research

De Waal’s research is also deeply concerned with space—both physical and conceptual. His installations consider architecture and how objects exist within a given environment. He studies the history of museum spaces, how objects are displayed, and how spatial constraints influence perception. In Library of Exile, he researches the architecture of libraries and archives, reflecting on how knowledge is contained and displaced.

His engagement with space is both practical and philosophical—he researches monastic architecture, minimalist aesthetics, and how Japanese traditions of display influence Western collecting practices. His interest in thresholds and liminal spaces (museum vitrines, library shelves, display cases) aligns with broader discussions in contemporary art about the politics of visibility and erasure.

Notable influences: Donald Judd, Carlo Scarpa, Gaston Bachelard.

https://www.edmunddewaal.com/resources/profile
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F1_rBYadxSI&t=2683s

Process + Typology

hatchets__ as experimental hybrid documentation media archaeology archival practice

Research Focus + Methodology

This submission investigates the potential of experimental research publishing and hybrid creative-archival documentation as a central methodology. The work is shaped by a constellation of interdisciplinary influences, including Renaissance workshop traditions, contemporary feminist performance archiving, art publishing practices, and speculative reinterpretations of classical tragedy—most notably Euripides’ Medea. These elements converge within a multi-modal digital framework, which functions as a critical inquiry, a dynamic publication, and an artwork in its own right.

Integration within Studio Practice

The research process is embedded in a broader studio practice that persistently examines historical entanglements through painting, writing, and performance. These inquiries are thematically situated within feminist critiques of authorship and culturally marginalised production. In this context, the website hatchets__ is neither supplementary documentation nor an auxiliary platform. Rather, it constitutes the primary site of artistic production. Structured around modular, episodic, and non-linear entries, it performs research in its own temporality. Through the inclusion of ancient texts such as Medea, embedded conversations with theatre practitioners (e.g., Helen McCrory), and a practice of layered annotation, the work interrogates the thresholds between myth and material, erasure and citation, document and enactment.

Format and Platform Design

The submission takes the form of a bespoke digital research platform accessible at hatchets.studio. The platform operates as an evolving, interactive archive; a research diary that collapses the boundaries between process, presentation, and performativity. Its design intentionally rejects academic linearity in favour of spatialised and iterative reading experiences. Each entry, delineated as a “chapter,” acts as a temporal and conceptual node. This structure realises an artist-led publishing model that challenges conventional separations of critical discourse and creative production. The format encompasses over forty hours of sustained development, design, and theoretical inquiry.

Theoretical + Conceptual Framework

The project is underpinned by feminist archival theory and experimental publishing paradigms. The intellectual grounding draws significantly on the works of Rebecca Schneider (Performing Remains), Saidiya Hartman’s notion of “critical fabulation,” and Sara Ahmed’s theorisation of citation as a feminist practice. It also engages with radical and independent publishing movements, including the work of Temporary Services and X Publishing School, as well as the literary-critical frameworks advanced by Maria Fusco and Kate Briggs. These sources advocate for porous boundaries between theory and practice, emphasising research methods that are affective, provisional, and embodied.

The digital structure reflects these commitments. Through dropdown menus, non-linear timelines, downloadable annotated files, and fractured chronologies, the interface visualises a model of scholarship that foregrounds the performativity of knowledge. The repeated invocation of Medea is emblematic—not merely as a textual reference but as a methodological figure. Medea represents the refusal of containment and the persistence of re-narration, functioning here as a recursive structural device through which questions of agency, loss, and citation are explored.

Creative Work + Artistic Strategy

Creatively, the project resides in the design and architecture of hatchets__ as an interface. Each module or chapter performs as a conceptual micro-installation, integrating diverse modalities: annotated literary texts, speculative and poetic writing, embedded media, and reflexive commentary. The deliberate absence of conventional visual artefacts is strategic; it positions research and design itself as aesthetic practices. The interface borrows visual language from archival systems and scholarly infrastructures (e.g., Monoskop, Punctum Books), yet operates with a minimalism that cultivates a durational, embodied readerly engagement.

This aesthetic is both formal and thematic. The use of grid structures and dropdowns echoes historical tools of commonplacing and classification while simultaneously invoking media archaeological frameworks. These gestures contextualise the platform as a living site—a research theatre in which the archive is never static, but continually enacted and refracted through the user’s interaction.

Theoretical Framework + Positionality

The conceptual undercurrents of the work extend from intersections of feminist archival theory, performance studies, and digital media archaeology. Diana Taylor’s distinction between the archive (material) and the repertoire (embodied) offers a foundation for analysing the dual performativity of the platform. In this framework, research becomes both a textual trace and a bodily act of engagement. Schneider’s argument that performances leave residual traces—or hauntings—resonates with the platform’s aesthetic of partiality and recurrence. Hartman’s practice of critical fabulation permits a speculative reassembly of erased or absent narratives, which the site engages through poetic speculation, layered citations, and dialogic interruption.

Moreover, the interface performs a form of temporal and epistemological refusal. It deliberately resists totalisation or closure, positioning knowledge production as a recursive and collaborative act. Every interaction with the site—each click, scroll, or download—becomes a micro-performance that reanimates the archive, enacting the very instability and re-performance the project seeks to investigate.

Conclusions

hatchets__ proposes an expanded methodology for artistic research: one that is at once feminist, performative, and speculative. It reframes the digital archive as both a subject and a method of inquiry, treating research as a living, embodied, and durational act. Through its hybrid form, the project asserts that the processes of documentation, citation, and publication are not supplementary to practice but constitute the work itself. In doing so, it contributes a timely and necessary intervention to contemporary debates around research, authorship, and artistic knowledge.

hatchets__ (which is part website, part system of an evolving conceptual framework with an experimental visual/typographic/structural language) is where I’ve been trying to conduct, house, and reflect a discursive research process within a contemporary art practice.

In a traditional research model or process, the artist or researcher is often positioned as either observer or maker, working in service of a thesis or argument. hatchets__ sort of inverts that hierarchy so that the process of undertaking the research is part of the process of generating the work. The ‘gesture’ is not in the artifact produced, but in the experimental process of inquiry, where tangents are outcomes, and ambiguity isn’t a flaw but part of why it exists.

Rather than pursue linear arguments or closed meanings, there’s been a lot of fragmentation, contradiction, interruption— which has lead to  generative outcomes. In terms of its conceptual framework a lot of the processes and thinking behind the site has been informed by feminist and decolonial research methods that question authorship, authority, and the need for coherence. 

I guess a lot of how it’s progressed has been alongside looking into and examining how knowledge systems have been formed and organised, by whom, and under what conditions. 

A lot of the process of making the site has been recursive, often the research has broken down and splintered into other unexpected tangents and having a process by which this can be traced back and not lost. In terms of its visual language having tabs of information as a live document has allowed a particular flow of research and thinking that otherwise I don’t think would’ve occurred. 

Further, the site has functioned like a digital workshop slash container that allows for fragments of processes such as documentation, texts, experiments, failed attempts, stray thoughts, image clusters to sit unresolved – maybe to be re-engaged with at a later date or connected to another thing or just left there to be picked up by someone else (not really sure who since I’m kind to the only one reading any part of the site)

I’ve avoided conventional hierarchies of presentation. There are no clean categories… Navigation is intentionally unstable. You can’t go backwards easily to where you were, you kind of have to clumsily find where you were which in its own way encourages me or the user to engage with the site in an way that I’m not used to online cos everything is so easy. Media overlaps and you have to expand your screen’s view by doing that two finger expandy thing on touch screen all the time which weirdly reminds me of the first time I actually used a touch screen device and how weird that felt…it was around the time I was obsessed with playing RuneScape and they’d just introduced the plugin that let you play the game on an iPhone (aka at school…)

The forced pre-digital clumsy unautomaticness gestures toward refusal—of clarity, of finality, of polish.

In that way hatchets reflects the kind of research and making process that I’m interested in: one that doesn’t aim to resolve, but to reveal (mostly just to me really). Not just a truth or a new idea, but the internal mechanics of what the fuck is going with anything really because nothing makes sense and there’s so many moving parts and all truth is up for grabs based on your perception or your reading or a different set of facts and everyone’s seeing hundreds if not thousands of visual material and advertising and stimulation all throughout the day as soon as we wake up and the last thing before I fall asleep usually it’s some insanely manic self motivational video of a really hot guy talking to me about the mental clarity benefits cold plunges while he’s shirtless. Anyway. What happens when you follow an idea until it falls apart? What remains in the debris? How can I think about anything or follow a train of thought when we exist in this reality now.

Throughout this process, I’ve become particularly interested in the instability of mediums slash media and what processes even are relevant to an art practice. So for example, I’ve gone back to a lot of really basic things like drawing, and putting things in cute little frames which have kind of expanded out and become installations or half way paintings or just paper on the floor that don’t seem that resolved or translated out of anything yet are exciting mutations that are moving with the process of thinking about things through the site and building the ‘ground work’ through the research. So the work kind of feels to me unfinished piece and about to slip into something else which is sort of exciting to me as a concept now because I usually over refine things and probably this is a process of finding a middle ground 

So what is being documented and what’s the process I guess the site is me proposing (to myself?) that documentation is not secondary or archival—it is constitutive/ is part of the work and generative of unexpected and exciting outcomes.

This hopefully leads to an expanded field of practice where the research process fuctions in a way where the decisions, annotation, tabs etc constitute marks on a larger drawing that never really resolves and has a back end framework view that looks like the shittest website ever designed.

1

I think I was about 15 the first time I met Ms Fry. I remember it was also probably the first time I’d been in a room that had those wire drying rack contraptions where you had 20 or 30 wire frames and interleaved between those you’d have paintings or whatever drying on the paper that had to be separated . I walked into the room and I thought what’s all this? I don’t think I really had time to take much of it in because immediately as soon as I had seen the contraption I heard this booming voice that sounded distinctly American and not altogether friendly. 

Ms Fry was an artist or I guess I’m drawing that assumption from my interactions with her because she was my Art teacher. It was the first time in my life that I was in class where Art was taken seriously and not as some sort of therapeutic childcare activity. This was because of Ms Fry’s personality which was sardonic and abrupt. I hasten to add that while yes she was a curmudgeonly old cow who would very often scream at you from across the room in a way that made me drop whatever was in my hands if her eye caught you doing something she didn’t want you doing almost as quickly as she’d anger she’d laugh in what I’d put down then as an American way. 

The class was introduction to photography and for some reason I fucking loved it from the word go. I loved the vinegary smell of liquid she showed us how to mix together in plastic tubs, I loved taking the photographic prints and stringing them up across the classroom with wooden pegs which to me looked like something from a scene in the sort of German film that I’d never seen but had listed as a favourite on my Facebook page that year. But mostly I loved it because of Miss Fry.  

She’d be in the dark room if we were in there developing the prints and the tension of this activity was always set extremely high because yeah we were stupid and she ran a tight ship as though all the chemicals were deadly and time, which was on one of those stopwatches with a lanyard and a giant button where your thumb went, was in some way against us. 

I managed to convince my parents that year that what I really needed was a Nikon SLR for my birthday because I was going to become a photojournalist and I was going become a photojournalist because Ms Fry loved Ansel Adams (pronounced in my head even now in that aforementioned American drawl) . Of course by the end of the semester I had maybe one decent photo which I’d taken from the top of the stairs at our house at nighttime with the figure of my brother blurred running down which I don’t believe even garnered as much as a passing comment from Ms Fry in any case so that pipe dream sank I think probably around the same time as the entire industry did ironically enough.

At the end of that year, I wasn’t in photography class anymore and it was one of the last days of school before summer. I heard Ms Fry’s voice boom down the hallway and she was even more pissed off sounding than usual, swearing which was unusual for a teacher and also unusually she was at the lockers.  She’d discovered after hearing their panicked wings flapping that some students who were about to graduate had played a joke of putting pigeons inside the lockers outside of the art rooms. I don’t remember sticking around for the aftermath but I found out later on that they had had to take their final exams externally because they’d been kicked out of the school that day.

2

Every generation secretly believes it will witness the end of the world. As children many of us were convinced we would live long enough to watch the sun die and we rehearsed our grief quietly for a catastrophe billions of years away.

The past suggests human beings can mistake uncertainty for apocalypse. Maybe that childhood anxiety has changed in scale and vocabulary and is still around us in how we negotiate climate collapse, political instability, an unwanted and unasked for technological future, and familiar societies fragmenting into new strangenesses. Maybe the world is neither fine nor doomed but unstable and indifferent and beautiful and terrible in unequal measures.

Maybe if there is another response to this state of affairs it is optimism and something close to radical hope, an insistence on continuing to make things and care for things and notice things and to expect miracles anyway.

3

A Bird Smashed Our Window And A Hidden Room Is Finally Opening