Edmund de Waal

Nov 28, 2025

Renowned potter, author, and curator Edmund de Waal shares his passion for ceramics and storytelling from his studio. He reflects on his early discovery of pottery and its deep connection to memory and identity. De Waal discusses his major exhibition of Danish ceramicist Axel Salto, emphasizing the interplay between craft and emotion in art. He explores the importance of vulnerability, the transformative power of clay, and the poetry embedded in his porcelain works, ultimately celebrating the human experience through the medium.

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ANECDOTE

First Pot At Age Five

Edmund de Waal first made a pot at age five after attending an evening pottery class with his father.
He returned every week and kept making pots, starting a lifelong vocation rooted in childhood access to craft.

INSIGHT

Making Anchored In Memory

Memory is central to Edmund de Waal's practice and fuels both making and research.
He travels to places tied to objects to hold resonant histories while creating contemporary vessels.

INSIGHT

Minimalism As Spatial Music

De Waal reduces forms to emphasise spaces between objects rather than decorative surface.
Simple celadon and white vessels create a 'full' minimalism made of breaths, beats and silence.

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New @TalkArt podcast episode! We meet legendary artist, potter and author @EdmunddeWaal at his studio in South London!!

We explore more than 40 years of making pots, and learn about the first major exhibition of acclaimed Danish ceramicist Axel Salto (1889 – 1961), considered one of the greatest masters of 20th-century ceramic art. This epic new show curated by #EdmunddeWaal (b.1964, Nottingham) is now open at the Hepworth Wakefield, including a major new installation by de Waal reflecting on Salto’s enduring influence.

Salto was a radical polymathic figure who crossed boundaries from one discipline to another, producing an extraordinary body of ceramic work alongside paintings, wood- cuts, drawings, book illustration and textiles. Salto is internationally renowned for his highly individual and expressive stoneware inspired by organic forms, characterised by budding, sprouting and fluted surface textures that appear to ripple and burst with life.

In his own visual art and literary works, Edmund de Waal uses objects as vehicles for human narrative, emotion, and history. His installations of handmade porcelain vessels, often contained in minimalist structures, investigate themes of diaspora, memory, and materiality.

De Waal’s sculptural practice, writing, and art historical research are deeply intertwined, as he works across mediums and collaborates with museums, poets, performers, musicians, and other visual artists, both living and deceased. Much of de Waal’s work is concerned with collecting and collections—how objects are kept together, lost, stolen, or dispersed.

His ceramics and writing expand upon conceptual and physical dialogues among minimalism, architecture, and sound, imbuing them with a sense of quiet calm. Manifest across de Waal’s practice is a distinct aesthetic philosophy that puts the hand, the sense of touch, and thus the human above all else. His work is about connecting people by reviving and telling stories that matter.

Playing with Fire: Edmund de Waal and Axel Salto

is now open and runs until 4th May 2026 at Hepworth Wakefield.

Follow @EdmundDeWaal and @HepworthWakefield on Instagram.

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