Pottery is Deep in the Human Story’: Edmund de Waal on Dust, Demons and His Danish Obsession

‘By Charlotte Higgins , Arts Correspondent
London, 19 November 2025

– In a sunlit former gun factory on a nondescript London industrial estate, potter and bestselling author Edmund de Waal stands amid the pristine hush of his studio, a space that hums with the quiet intensity of creation.

Against the blinding white walls, de Waal cuts a sharp silhouette in neat workwear, his voice rising in a cascade of ideas as he tours the facility – a far cry from the dusty chaos of traditional potteries.

At 55, de Waal is no novice to the alchemy of clay. His 2010 memoir The Hare with Amber Eyes, a poignant family saga traced through tiny Japanese netsuke carvings that survived the Holocaust, sold over a million copies and earned him a place among Britain’s literary elite.

But it’s his dual life as potter and writer that defines him, a tension he navigates in this converted warehouse: workstations for his team of assistants, storerooms stacked with raw materials, and vast, coffin-like black vessels from a recent Danish residency dominating the main hall.

Up a discreet staircase lies the potter’s wheel, site of raw invention; opposite, a desk piled with books where words take shape.

De Waal flings open the door to the kiln room, revealing shelves groaning under experimental glazes and forms – a gallery of near-misses.

“People always comment on how tidy it is,” he says, irritation flickering. “But it’s porcelain. Dust is the enemy.”

He recounts the historical scourge of “potter’s lung,” silicosis born from clay clouds, a hazard he’s intimately known from apprenticeships spent sweeping endless debris.

“We’ve fought dust for centuries to avoid explosions, bloating, dunting – all those kiln disasters.”

This aversion to grit echoes de Waal’s writing. In The White Road (2015), he evoked the choking dust of Jingdezhen, China’s porcelain heartland.

In Letters to Camondo (2021), he mused on the Ephrussi family’s ascent from Odesa’s shtetls to Parisian opulence, where servants waged “war on dust” to erase humble origins.

Quoting W.G. Sebald, he adds: “Ash is a redeemed substance, like dust.” For de Waal, these remnants – dust, ashes, shards – symbolize endurance.

Ceramics, he argues, are paradoxically fragile yet eternal: “You can’t destroy them; you can only break them.” Shards persist for millennia, bearing witness where flesh fails.

“Pottery is deep in the human story,” de Waal declares, gesturing to mythic origins in every culture – from squeezing clay to birthing form.

Techniques evolve, but the essence endures: “Anyone from 1680 could walk in here, handle the materials, grasp the kiln’s whims.” He nods to his shelf of “failures,” alchemical dross hinting at transmutation’s thrill.

That thrill now fuels Playing with Fire: Edmund de Waal and Axel Salto, an exhibition opening 22 November at The Hepworth Wakefield in Yorkshire.

Curated by de Waal, it spotlights his 30-year fixation with Axel Salto (1889–1961), the Danish ceramicist whose bulbous stoneware vessels – sprouting tentacle-like protrusions, knotted like tree galls – unsettle and beguile.

“I saw them decades ago and thought, ‘What on earth is this?'” de Waal recalls. “Disturbing, unlike anything I’d seen.

Then I got obsessed – and discovered he’d written about the demonic in ceramics, fear, transformation.”

Salto, a polymath who designed textiles and penned children’s books on printing stamps, drew from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, the Roman epic of shape-shifting gods. For de Waal, this resonates: ceramics capture change in flux. “At their core is something transformed – but Salto insisted it’s present tense.

Glaze melts before your eyes; things still move.” Repetition, too, binds them: Salto’s patterned fabrics mirror a potter’s rhythmic throwing, lifetime after lifetime of forms refined.

In his stamp book, Salto enthused: “The imprint, dull alone, excites in multiples. Repetition is fun.”

The Wakefield show embraces this joyously. A dedicated zone invites children to experiment with stamps – “not for curriculum, but play,” de Waal insists.

“It’s how we discover our place in the world, materially alive. Stripping craft from kids is a disgrace.”

Amid Yorkshire’s industrial heritage, Salto’s “bewitching” pots will dialogue with de Waal’s porcelain, probing the demonic and divine in clay.

Politics infuses de Waal’s practice, too. Across the Atlantic, The Eight Directions of the Wind – a multi-venue show at The Huntington in Los Angeles – runs until 26 October 2026, framing porcelain as “migratory material.”

Black wares gleam in shadowed Japanese gardens; Meissen plates, Nazi-looted and Dresden-bombed, gleam anew via kintsugi – Japanese repair that honors scars.

A “poetry library” gathers verses from 200 immigrant American poets, a sanctuary in porcelain. “Very pointed,” de Waal says of its migration themes, amid global flux.

His mind races onward: a first draft nears completion for a book mining family archives – unpublished letters between his grandmother Elisabeth Ephrussi and Rainer Maria Rilke, the poet who inspired Proust’s Charles Swann (another relative).

“Obsessional,” de Waal admits when asked if he recalls every pot he’s thrown, from impoverished youth in rural Herefordshire to now.

Insomnia once drove him to tally them for sleep; today, it’s fuel. “Not repeating the same, but breathing between variations.”

De Waal’s orbit – exhibitions, books, a brain “scattering projects” – defies containment.

Yet in clay’s grip, he finds anchor: dust-beaten, transformative, alive. As Salto might say, it’s the repetition that enchants.