...a series inspired by my experiences as a volunteer Welcoming Ambassador at the Victoria & Albert Museum
Signs and Wonders
We recently re-launched the free 10-minute introductory talks offered at the Grand Entrance to the museum. During the madness of Savage Beauty, the wildly popular exhibit on the work of designer Alexander McQueen, we had to take down our sign offering these to make room for the crowds queuing for tickets to the sell-out show. Now that it’s calmer, we’ve started again, this time with a hand-held sign. Not everyone wants an introduction, but many new visitors seem to welcome a quick guide to the vast collections.
If I have the luxury on focusing their attention on one piece, I choose Signs and Wonders by Edmund de Waal. This is what I say:
Welcome to the V&A, the world’s greatest museum of art and design. A schoolroom for everyone – that’s the way its first director, Henry Cole, described it - a welcoming place to inspire and provoke. We are free, we are open every day, and we open late on Fridays.
Signs and Wonders
We recently re-launched the free 10-minute introductory talks offered at the Grand Entrance to the museum. During the madness of Savage Beauty, the wildly popular exhibit on the work of designer Alexander McQueen, we had to take down our sign offering these to make room for the crowds queuing for tickets to the sell-out show. Now that it’s calmer, we’ve started again, this time with a hand-held sign. Not everyone wants an introduction, but many new visitors seem to welcome a quick guide to the vast collections.
If I have the luxury on focusing their attention on one piece, I choose Signs and Wonders by Edmund de Waal. This is what I say:
Welcome to the V&A, the world’s greatest museum of art and design. A schoolroom for everyone – that’s the way its first director, Henry Cole, described it - a welcoming place to inspire and provoke. We are free, we are open every day, and we open late on Fridays.
Signs and Wonders, Edmund de Waal
Let me tell you a bit about the museum. First of all, I want you to look up, inside the dome in the grand entrance. Do you see the red shelf, with white pots on it, running along the inside of the dome? That’s an installation called ‘Signs and Wonders’, by ceramic artist Edmund de Waal. He produced this work to celebrate the revamping, several years ago, of the ceramics galleries on the 6th floor of this building, which is the later of the two buildings that make up the museum. (The early building is the dark red brick one on the other side of our garden, just through the shop. It was built to replace the Brompton Boilers, the glass and iron structure designed by Prince Albert after the Great Exhibition of 1851. It opened in 1857, and it was followed by this one we’re standing in, for which Queen Victoria laid the foundation stone in 1899, just two years before she died.)
De Waal describes the pieces in this work as “a kind of love story with the ceramics collections, and they’re a kind of conversation with the collections at the V&A, they’re a kind of a very personal memory of my journeys through the V&A’s ceramics collections over the last 30 years”. He chose this location because it’s the one place in the whole of the V&A that connects the ground floor, the threshold, with those great galleries.
De Waal describes the pieces in this work as “a kind of love story with the ceramics collections, and they’re a kind of conversation with the collections at the V&A, they’re a kind of a very personal memory of my journeys through the V&A’s ceramics collections over the last 30 years”. He chose this location because it’s the one place in the whole of the V&A that connects the ground floor, the threshold, with those great galleries.
Before this building was built, the first ceramics galleries were actually in the older building in what is now the Silver Galleries, on the 3rd floor. If you go up and see those galleries you can still see signs of their former occupants: a frieze high up painted with the names of centres of ceramic manufacturing from 100 to 1700 AD, two columns restored to their original glory, clad with Minton majolica reliefs, and what we call the Ceramic Staircase.
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 The V&A’s ceramics collection is unrivalled in the world and includes more than 34,000 objects from the 4th millennium BC to the present day. The collection is particularly rich in Ceramics from Asia, the Middle East and Europe. The Victorian founders of the V&A aimed to influence taste by collecting and displaying examples of the best designs, from ironwork to textiles, jewellery to pottery. Alongside British ceramics were gathered pieces from Europe, India, China, Japan, Turkey, Morocco and Iran. They range from a Coptic jar from 5th century Egypt to a vase by contemporary artist Grayson Perry. |  |
For a hundred years, after moving to the 6th floor of this building up to the revamping of the galleries four years ago, the galleries were a half mile of dark mahogany cabinets and glass vitrines housing, as de Waal, has said, pot after pot after pot, pots layered on pots, ‘a collection of collections’. The V&A itself describes it as being cluttered, confusing and tired. It was, de Waal says, a melancholy place, and a virtually empty one, but he spent many happy hours there as a teenager finding his way through pots, making connections.
The new ceramics galleries opened in 2010. They attempt to tell significant stories of ceramic history, and unlike the previous arrangement of collections, they now juxtapose pieces from Asia and Europe, showing the influence of different cultures on one another. Gone are the dark cabinets, and instead we can see through the glass of one cabinet into another.
This fits in well with De Waal’s vision for his installation. He often works with what he calls ‘cargoes’ of pots, groups or multiples that make connections between cultures. Influenced by Japanese porcelain pottery, de Waal says he’s drawn to its naturalness and to its “contradictory notions of strength and fragility”. Each of the 425 pots is a shade of white, contrasting with the red lacquer steel shelf. The red colour is intentional, evoking the red seal in the corner of ink paintings.
pot after pot after pot, pots layered on pots, ‘a collection of collections’
De Waal describes his piece as “responding to the specific architecture of the place”. The shelf tracks the circumference of the dome, held in only four places – an astonishing and complex engineering feat that provides a link between past (the 1909 galleries as they were) and present (the new galleries), and between the ground (the Grand Entrance) and the unreachable heights of the dome.
The new ceramics galleries opened in 2010. They attempt to tell significant stories of ceramic history, and unlike the previous arrangement of collections, they now juxtapose pieces from Asia and Europe, showing the influence of different cultures on one another. Gone are the dark cabinets, and instead we can see through the glass of one cabinet into another.
This fits in well with De Waal’s vision for his installation. He often works with what he calls ‘cargoes’ of pots, groups or multiples that make connections between cultures. Influenced by Japanese porcelain pottery, de Waal says he’s drawn to its naturalness and to its “contradictory notions of strength and fragility”. Each of the 425 pots is a shade of white, contrasting with the red lacquer steel shelf. The red colour is intentional, evoking the red seal in the corner of ink paintings.
pot after pot after pot, pots layered on pots, ‘a collection of collections’
De Waal describes his piece as “responding to the specific architecture of the place”. The shelf tracks the circumference of the dome, held in only four places – an astonishing and complex engineering feat that provides a link between past (the 1909 galleries as they were) and present (the new galleries), and between the ground (the Grand Entrance) and the unreachable heights of the dome.
I love what Glenn Adamson, formerly of the V&A and now director of New York’s Museum of Arts and Design, said about Signs and Wonders, that it has the ‘if’ factor: “If you look up it is there. If you don’t look up it is still there.” He also said that “The magic of the V&A’s vast permanent collection is that each visitor discovers it anew, through a unique and completely personal process of selection.”
One attraction for me is the way the ceramics galleries (although this holds true of many of the other galleries as well) blurs the line between art and craft – an often arbitrary and unnecessary distinction.
De Waal is one of many of Britain’s, and the world’s, most successful designers, artists and craftspeople who have used the V&A as a source of ideas and stimulation over the past 150 years: Arts and Crafts pioneers William Morris and William de Morgan (Islamic design), children’s author Beatrix Potter (textiles), Italian designer Alessi (Dresser), among others. Everyone is welcome to come here to see the work of these artists alongside the historic collections that helped to inspire them.
I hope you enjoyed this introductory talk!
One attraction for me is the way the ceramics galleries (although this holds true of many of the other galleries as well) blurs the line between art and craft – an often arbitrary and unnecessary distinction.
De Waal is one of many of Britain’s, and the world’s, most successful designers, artists and craftspeople who have used the V&A as a source of ideas and stimulation over the past 150 years: Arts and Crafts pioneers William Morris and William de Morgan (Islamic design), children’s author Beatrix Potter (textiles), Italian designer Alessi (Dresser), among others. Everyone is welcome to come here to see the work of these artists alongside the historic collections that helped to inspire them.
I hope you enjoyed this introductory talk!
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