EDMUND DE WAAL

The works in if you came this way consist of de Waal’s porcelain vessels, lyrically arranged in vitrines alongside glimpses of other materials, including gold, silver, lead, marble, aluminum, alabaster, and Kilkenny stone. These installations act as repositories of memory, archives, and language. They are intended to invite slow looking and contemplation.

In the series if you came this way (2025), de Waal has for the first time displayed his vessels in gilded vitrines, where gold leaf has been applied to oak using a technique that is thousands of years old. Many combine the radiant aura of gold with brushed-on liquid porcelain, creating a new materiality that evinces porcelain’s historical designation as “white gold.” These works respond to devotional images by Duccio, Giotto, and other Proto-Renaissance artists. The housing of vessels within golden structures recalls reliquaries: containers of sacred objects.

The large-scale installations as if even now you were sleeping, rain diary, and as long as it talks I am going to listen (all 2025) hold many groupings of vessels to form topographies resembling lines in a poem or music in a score.

For de Waal, his installations are a kind of poetry. Many different voices are held in the works of this show, where de Waal has inscribed fragments of poetry into porcelain tiles that sit alongside his vessels. The titles of the works are drawn from texts by Matsuo Bashō, Paul Celan, T. S. Eliot, Louise Glück, Li-Young Lee, Thomas Merton, Marianne Moore, Charles Olson, and Marco Polo—studies of homecoming, exile, and the fugitive lands of memory.

“My whole life is trying to think about place and displacement—how things, people, and stories move, often against their will, across borders,” de Waal observes. “I work with these themes in the objects that I make, finding spaces where they can be held in a place of some safety.”

The exhibition’s title draws from a line in Eliot’s poem “Little Gidding”__(1942), a meditation on place, pilgrimage, destruction, and renewal. The poem’s central image of fire speaks to the alchemical transformation of clay into ceramic in the heat of the kiln.

if you came this way coincides with the eight directions of the wind at The Huntington in San Marino, California.__This yearlong exhibition features three site-specific installations by de Waal, and is on view through October 26, 2026.