In episode four of The Modern House Podcast, our co-founder Matt Gibberd speaks to the internationally renowned artist and writer Edmund de Waal about his work, life and home, as well as his top three living spaces around the world.

De Waal was born in 1964 and grew up in what he calls ‘complicated medieval houses’ in Lincoln and then Canterbury – he’s the son of a former Dean of Canterbury Cathedral. His first encounter with pottery, the profession he has devoted his life to, happened at just five years old, and sparked an enduring fascination with materials; “what materials do is my absolutely my whole life. It’s thinking about how little you need to do to a material to reveal its character,” he says.

After an undergraduate degree in English literature at the University of Cambridge, and postgraduate study in Japanese language at the University of Sheffield, de Waal went to Japan to study ceramics at the Mejiro Ceramics Studio in Tokyo. Returning to London (where he has been based since) in 1993, de Waal would later begin to make the sort of work that he’s become synonymous with: arrangements of minimal, monochromatic porcelain pieces, the beauty of which comes as much from their individual forms as the thought-provoking ways they are positioned and framed in relation to each other.

In many ways, de Waal could be described as a designer of space, in so much as his work is concerned with the discipline’s constituent parts: light and shadow, spatial qualities, materials, scale and the process of construction. In fact, says de Waal, it was the very act of installing work in relation to architecture – in buildings such as the Bauhausian High Cross House in Devon and Kettle’s Yard in Cambridge – that prompted him to consider the question that has driven his work since: how objects occupy space.

For de Waal’s reflections on all that and more, including what he picked as his top three living spaces across the world, listen to the episode now, which was recorded via a video call at the artist’s south London studio. Make sure to subscribe to the podcast so that you never miss an episode, and if you could rate and review us, we’d be more than grateful. Happy listening.

Read more about In Praise of Shadows by Junichiro Tanizaki, mentioned in the episode.