HM: In the Chinese tradition, poetry and painting are known as the sister arts, as if they were different forms of the same phenomenon. It’s interesting in your work where I observe porcelain as the third wheel between poetry and painting as you have talked profusely about language and poetry, but at the same time I see a compositional reference to the vertical and horizontal scrolls, the appreciation of the form of words, the isometric perspective and the spatial placement of mountains in Chinese painting, especially in your music in thirteen parts (2017). Were you conscious of this three-way dialogue among poetry, painting and porcelain during the process of making?

EDW: I really do. And they are three wheels or three sisters, perhaps. For me a good sisterhood to be part of. There's obviously a huge aesthetic kind of pleasure in the placing of a poem, or a mark on a page. It's a visceral, somatic thing for me. And it can be in relation to looking at particularly Japanese Zen calligraphy of the early 13th, 14th century when I went to Japan at 17.

There's always been that kind of a pleasurable act of seeing how space is created by that moment of writing. The second thing is because I really spend my life reading poetry. And so I'm always drawn to the western tradition, to fragmentary poetry, to the poetry of Emily Dickinson, the poetry of Celan, the shorter poems of Wallace Stevens, because of the space they occupy on the page. When you look at a fragmentary poem of Dickinson on a white page, I have the same reaction about the negative space around the poem working as if I'm seeing. There is a kinship there, with Chinese landscape painting, or with the mark-making in Zen calligraphy. So there's a connection between how you read spatially. This has been very important to me. That's obviously influenced massively the way I make put objects down, the porcelain I make into vitrines. A vitrines is a page, nothing more. The simple way of making a three dimensional page in space, and then allowing the separate elements to have power within them.

HM: I find the idea of the vitrine as a page very interesting in that it also makes things instantly for viewing but not so much for using. And I wonder if you expect those who own your porcelain work also use it? Or are they supposed to be in the vitrine only to be viewed, not really to be used?

EDW: For decades I made pots, absolutely to use, and that was training in the first 30 years of my making life. And then a long period of making things only in the vitrines, often like in the Victoria and Albert Museum, held very very far away. So they become much more objects of contemplation.

But actually, just now, two weeks ago in London, I opened an exhibition called some winter pots, which are all the pots I made in lockdown. These pots, going all the way back for me into making pots, are entirely about being picked up, handled, and touched. Some of them are mended with kintsugi, some of them mended with lead. And there are different bodies of work. I’m being distracted because I have a rather beautiful 8th Century Buddhist hand on my desk in front of me. Isn’t that gorgeous?

[Edmund and Mengyun were admiring the beauty of the wooden Buddhist hand.]

HM: We have learned an abundance of meanings associated with the color white, be it visual, poetic, material, symbolic, linguistic, or religious, from your book The White Road. What about the color black employed in works such as the second, loss (2018) ?

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