The weekend Wall Street Journal in early June mentions Edmund de Waal’s 2019 installation ‘library of exile’ at the British Museum—”an installation featuring 2,000 books by exiled writers from Ovid to the present, along with his own works in porcelain.” And de Waal speaks of needing silence for his new work inspired by poetry, “especially Han Shan, a Chinese poet associated with the Tang dynasty (619-907). Han Shan’s Cold Mountain verses are ‘beautiful, beautiful poems about what it is to be alone—to let the experiences of life just wash over you and keep going’.” During this coronavirus period many of us are experiencing long periods of being alone—de Waal is in his studio making his pottery; he says, “the heart of this has to be done in silence.”
Edmund de Waal’s library of exile