White

I recently went to Edmund de Waal’s exhibition at the Royal Academy.  I am not sure what I was expecting but I but I found myself to be really rather overawed by the experience.  It was quite a small exhibition and I think that this gave it an intimacy which added to the enjoyment.

Perhaps it was the subdued lighting and the sense of history of the setting which provided such a special atmosphere.  The library has never been used for an exhibition before and so there was a feeling of having been invited into a private part of the Academy; that you were no longer just the general public.  We were the only people there for most of the time and, with a very informative and interesting security man, we toured the exhibition learning a lot about the library and feeling very privileged.

Because I don’t look very carefully at all the blurb which the RA sends me through the post, I think I had assumed that the exhibition was about de Waal more than by de Waal.  I had not expected to see such a diverse collection of work.  There was his Hare with Amber Eyes – I have only just got round to reading the book and so I was extraordinarily emotional about seeing this exquisite beauty so soon afterwards.  How wonderful that, after all this piece has seen, it has made it to such a hallowed location, even on a temporary basis.  There also were a number of de Waal’s own pieces lighting up dark corners of the library with the stunning translucence of porcelain.  But  how amazing to be invited to think about the works of composer John Cage and a pure white Meissen beaker during the same afternoon.

I am a dead ringer for collections of similar, very simple things and so I love the idea of a group of white objects.  I also go floppy at the knees when I real things such as the opening paragraph of the exhibition blurb: ‘White is an aura.  White is a staging post to look at the word from.  White is not neutral; it forces other colours to reveal themselves. It moralises – it is clean when nothing else is clean, it is light when most things are heavy.  It is political. It is enmeshed in the world’.  Yes, it is!