There is slowness embedded in making pots—forming, turning, glazing, firing—that mirrors that of writing books and poetry—phrasing, finding rhythms, meaning-making. It all takes time. Added to this is history, archival material, lineage and the endless search for self. Edmund de Waal has spent a lifetime involved in all of it: pottery, books, poetry and archives. He works with porcelain, translucent and paper-thin, glazed at high temperatures. Out of the kiln, when tapped, each small vessel sounds like a tiny bell. The echo it makes in his gun factory-turned-studio in London, along with some of his favorite music playing while he works, like Bach’s French Suites, is embedded into these delicate vessels, as are the imprints of his hands.
De Waal has been making pots for 55 years. He’s also a writer. His best-known book is The Hare with Amber Eyes, which won the Costa Book Award, the Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Prize, and the Windham-Campbell Literature Prize. He also wrote The White Road, Letters to Camondo and most recently An Archive; he is finishing another book that will be published in the U.K. in November this year. Exhibitions of his work are currently on at the Huntington Museum in L.A., the Hepworth in Wakefield, England, Prague Castle Riding School and, this August, at the Gana Art Center in Seoul. His work is in museum collections around the world. In our interview, de Waal considered every question, weighing them with lucid answers. He is extremely generous, with a wide-open heart and deep thoughts. We covered so much territory that the interview had to be condensed.
In your conversation with Axel Salto in your book, Playing with Fire, you said that you needed to know first how he paces the world. I’m curious how you pace the world, because you cover so much ground. You’re constantly producing work. You have exhibits, you write books. How do you pace your world?
I think the best way of answering that is the difference between two different recordings of Glenn Gould’s Goldberg Variations. At the beginning, he’s very fast and very involved. And the second late one in 1981, he’s much slower, and he hums along. All the time. My pacing of the world was very, very, very fast for a very long time. And it involved lots of travel and a huge amount of needing to be in so many different places. It was pretty pacey, a sort of Philip Glass pace. Steve Reich in Tehillim had that kind of pacing. I think more latterly that in my writing and in my making; it’s not only slower, but I’m humming along as I do it too. So I’m responding more in the moment to what’s going on. It’s slower; it doesn’t look like it from the outside, but from the inside, it’s definitely a slower pacing.
That’s also a part of aging.
I think there’s something about making decisions and choices about what’s of value. And so fewer projects, slower projects and iterative projects. Returning to things that I feel need to be renewed, reviewed, walked over again. My Archive book was going back and looking again, and picking up on archival, unfinished, contingent scraps of things that I had left by the wayside.
Rereading An Archive, I really appreciated hearing about The Hare with Amber Eyes again. It’s a return for the reader as well, which is lovely.
I’m glad you felt that. One always feels like that could be hubristic.
It wasn’t. Also in The White Road. When I watch videos of you working, I can feel the silkenness of the porcelain and hear the sound like bells.
I wish you could be in the studio with these huge black vessels I’ve made, which you can absolutely thump them and they ring. Do you know that at the end of Tarkovsky’s Andrei Rublev, there’s a great moment of bells that has that kind of extraordinary quality? You can hit them, and they hold sound for a long time. That’s the thing about objects and their reverberation in the world.
The sound of the objects, are they changing for you? You’re doing different things with them.
I am doing different things. I’m on the cusp of things changing. I don’t know if anyone’s going to notice, but for me they’re changing. I’ve been using a lot of wood recently. I’ve been using silver, which I can work with in my hands in the studio, tear it and oxidize it. I went through quite an austere, very minimal patch about 15 years ago, when it felt like there were fewer and fewer objects happening in the world, and more and more and more space. Now I’m really enjoying the making, coming back and repopulating of the world with things. And the objects reflect that kind of renewed energy and warmth. There’s something happening.
You said that at the heart of your practice is play but also destruction, putting different things together, making and breaking. Axel Salto said, “I’ve always preferred burning mistakes to tepid accuracies.”
I think you can always tell if someone has stopped playing. As I get older, I am conscious of seeing people who are just really treading water or scared of things going wrong. One of the great delights, absolute principal delights to me about ceramics, full stop, is unpredictability. I seriously do not know what is going to happen. In the kiln, the technical mistakes get fewer, but the aesthetic possibilities of things being different just get greater and greater. So there’s that element of the experiential and of play, inherently there. In the last decade, my relationship with the shard and the broken object has deepened and deepened. I’m conscious of the brokenness. I can’t any longer just make intact objects and throw them back into the world.
Letters to Camondo was hugely significant for me, not only the book but the exhibition. Very few of the installations that I put into the house didn’t have something broken or patched or damaged in some way. And that felt to me absolutely appropriate, a proper humane response to those stories. One particular installation was a small porcelain box held in a Sèvres cabinet half-opened, where I wrote one of my letters to Moïse de Camondo into porcelain, and then broke it, put that letter into the porcelain box and then closed the door. It’s not performative brokenness.
The marvelous feeling of opening the kiln and seeing the alchemized result… it’s interesting you’re saying you have fewer mistakes there, but you have a lot more creativity.
The field of possibilities seems to me to extend and extend and extend. Each time you open the kiln, each time the invitation comes to work in a particular place, the field of possibilities is greater because it might not just be a vessel. It might be a text. It might be using porcelain to put onto a wall and then inscribing something into a particular place for that particular moment. The kind of lines of thinking and exploring between words and objects has gotten much more beautifully entangled for me over the last 20 years. I don’t necessarily know when I start a project what the outcome will be. I don’t know if it’s going to be a book or an intervention. So in that sense, the opening of the kiln is almost a metaphor—it happens—but it’s also a metaphor for not necessarily knowing what’s going to be there. And that’s very exciting.
That’s what you’re doing with the breath book, pouring porcelain and gold leaf over the existing words and gorgeous paper. The whole process is in flux. Are you not concerned that you’ll mess it up?
You began with a very lovely question about pace. And in a very real sense, that’s it, isn’t it? There’s a sort of metamorphic moment of pouring and then writing, and then things settle. The key thing is that everything becomes a palimpsest. You can do something on top or again. You have a series of immediate actions and a series of belated responses, or iterative responses to something. And what you’re trying to do is to hold all those different tenses in play together. You’re endlessly feeling that something isn’t quite finished. It’s still happening.
The preciousness of that book, the fact that it’s so large, on this incredible paper, in a limited edition. That’s a huge risk.
You know, it is. One of the dangers is that I get invitations and don’t take risks. The Huntington—amazing storied institution—said come do something here, and you take your A game. You don’t throw everything at it. You don’t spend those years, do as much as you possibly can, and sort of deliver something in a PDF. I don’t know how people do that. You’ve got to turn up for the history, for the people, for the place. You’ve got to be there to know what depth a project can entail. At the Huntington, I’ve made a new library of poetry. I’ve taken over one of their Japanese tea houses. I’ve shipped out a thousand years of broken porcelain shards. And they said yes to it all, because they could see how one part of this project had an energy field to another part. It could only happen with the institutional and personal trust in play.
You’re in your studio, and you’re making work. Your dog is lying by your side, and music is playing. What are you listening to?
I was listening to Handel’s Concerto Grossi this morning because they were so energetic, and it was a beautiful spring morning. The last few weeks have been relentless travel—Madrid, Paris, Vienna—and I haven’t been in the studio as much as I wanted to be, so I return to bits of music that are restorative, like Bach’s French Suites with Murray Perahia. I can handle repetition. My poor old studio team here has the same piece of music on repeat. I listen to a lot of contemporary, new music as well. I was in Rome in the Sistine Chapel listening to this amazing new piece by James MacMillan.
Tell us about your dog that follows you up and down the stairs all day long and lies by your side while you work.
Her name is Isla, like the island. She’s an absolute mutt—a big, hairy French dog, basically. Fourteen and a half. She’s an elderly lady now.
You collect books. What are your favorite books and authors? When do you read? Where do you read?
I read every single minute of the day. I was the chair of the Booker Prize for fiction in 2024. That meant for almost nine months I read nothing but contemporary fiction. I’ve been catching up on a year of non-fiction and poetry. I’ve just finished another book, a new book which is about poetry. As a consequence, I’ve been reading a lot of the poetry that I was reading as a teenager: Rilke, Auden, Eliot. I had an American friend who was furious that, as a teenager, I wasn’t reading American poetry. So when I was 13, she started sending me Wallace Stevens, John Berryman, Robert Bly, Elizabeth Bishop and Marianne Moore. So I’ve been rereading what I was reading when I was between the ages of 15 and 20. My Jewish grandmother used to correct my poems and send them back to me and tell me what to read. She sent me the Duino Elegies when I was 13. I mean, for goodness sake.
You’ve been making pots seriously since you were five, and you’re 61 now, 56 years. Do you still have some of those pots you made when you were a child?
I still have what I made when I was about, I don’t know, 12 or 13, about 50 years’ worth. I’ve got an archive.
You said that you want to make things so beautiful that when people see them, they fall over. You also said that beauty can be dangerous.
There are obviously the seductions of beauty that are something sort of Keatsian—you are seduced by cadence, by a chord, by a glaze. And that can take you away, not in a positive way, but in a way that removes you from where you are. It strikes me that the things I can remember, which are truly beautiful and extraordinary, are things that are genuinely profound responses to the complexity of the world, reframing the complexity of the world anew. That makes you want to breathe differently, move differently, pace differently, sound the world differently. And why not? Why not have the aspiration to make something that beautiful? It seems to me perverse not to want to try to do that in the world.
What are the beautiful, truly beautiful, profound things for you?
A particular mended fisherman’s coat that Issey Miyake used to wear. I remember having dinner with him and the coat he was wearing, which was 200 years old that had been mended over generations by different people. You couldn’t see where the original object was anymore. It was just itself. I’ve been thinking so much about Iran at the moment and of a particular Iznik plate because it’s springtime, a 12th-century ceramic plate of a carpet of spring flowers. How can you have something more beautiful and evanescent than spring flowers and then make them into a dish?
I was in Vienna two weeks ago in the Kunsthistorisches Museum, and there was an extraordinary painting by Dürer of the Maximilian, who was his great patron, holding a pomegranate. I was looking at the hand. The hand of this man he’d painted, who he loved and respected, holding this pomegranate, thinking he understands hands and he understands power. He understands to paint an emperor holding a pomegranate.
I grew up in Canterbury and, in the amazing Gothic cathedral that I’ve known all my life, there are particular stairs that go up towards the end of the cathedral towards what’s called the martyrdom, where Thomas Becket was murdered. The stairs are worn away and are absolutely beautiful. It’s like water moving down a hillside. It’s a structure, planned. It’s 800 years old, with a sense of being known and handled and touched and walked on, mended and inhabited by not just the person who made them, but by all the sequential people who have been near them. Perhaps that’s what I’m talking about with beauty, is that feeling of lived-in-ness.
You said that vessels are “held breath,” like poetry, with all the pauses, Dickinson’s dashes and stanzas, empty spaces. Breath is space, absence of sound. Perhaps the sound of porcelain. When you’re placing your vessels in the vitrines, do you space them like poetry? They’re in conversation and also isolated.
I can put those objects down, those fragments, those bits of silver, marble, porcelain, whatever they are, into an empty space with shelves, staves if you like. And then begin to feel the force field between them. At that moment when I’m beginning to feel how to move them around and how to find the spaces between objects—or the concretions of objects—they begin to really sound for me. I begin to actually hear something. It’s like writing in a sense. You have to return and return and return, cross things out, find more spaces, lengthen, shorten, redact, until the words, the sentences, the paragraphs, the page, the chapter begins to pull itself together. The strangest moment is when I put the cover on the vitrine, when everything is still contingent. Everything is held there, the air, there are pauses, the breath, and it’s stilled, which is so similar to a book you read, the book you’ve written. Your words are still on the page. And then you read them again, and they get all activated. It’s like a John Cage score, a late Wallace Stevens poem. The afterlife, the ongoing life of a work of art, is so interesting.
Because they’re alive, you’ve made them alive. This comes around to your aspiration, as you get older, to slow down.
I’ve just had my team print out the next couple of years of what’s happening. It’s a little alarming in lots of ways. There’s not slowing in that sense. I think what I’m doing is finding a depth within the projects, a slightly different pace. I get quite excited, actually—I’m working with extraordinary people and places. All these things that I said yes to are things where I’m really, really, genuinely exploratory. It’s not to deliver stuff. It’s to find, find, find out more.
You said that desire is the great motivating force. It’s the generative force. Do you have a sense of the soul?
What I’m doing has to do with faith. I am doing a very personal project in Oxford in the autumn and winter about faith. It’s also about deep human history and listening to other iterations and expressions of other people’s understanding of that poetry, that prayer. I designed this extraordinary production (Yugen) of Leonard Bernstein’s Chichester Psalms for the choreographer, Wayne McGregor (Royal Ballet). It’s happening again soon, and that’s something that matters to me. I’m doing a talk in September in New York at the Jewish Museum, alongside a version of an exhibition currently on at the Riding Castle in Prague, “Fragments of Memory.”
I’d like to end with this: you said to me once that you “inhabit poetry.” Is there one poem that embodies you?
Yes, there’s a poem called “Heimkehr,” or homecoming, by Paul Celan. It’s about whiteness. It’s about return. It’s about loss. It’s about breath.
Snowfall, denser and denser,
dove-coloured as yesterday,
snowfall, as if even now you were sleeping.
White, stacked into distance.
Above it, endless,
the sleigh track of the lost.
Below, hidden,
presses up
what so hurts the eyes,
hill upon hill,
invisible.
On each,
fetched home into its today,
and I slipped away into dumbness:
wooden, a post.
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