Abstract

A talk by Edmund de Waal on his installation ‘A Local History’ for the Alison Richard Building.

A local history is an installation of three vitrines filled with porcelain, sunk below the paving outside the Alison Richard Building on the Sidgwick Site of Cambridge University. These vitrines are meant to be discovered, to be happened upon as you come and go across the site. They are there to make you pause momentarily. They are not sculpture as a Grand Statement.

About Edmund de Waal

Edmund de Waal is one of the world’s leading artists working in ceramics today. He is best known for his large-scale installations of porcelain vessels, with interventions at Waddesdon Manor, the Victoria & Albert Museum, Tate Britain and MIMA . Much of his recent work has been concerned with ideas of collecting and collections: how objects are kept together, lost, stolen, or dispersed.