Curator Talk: Edmund de Waal
Thursday 15 January, 6pm
£20 / £18 / Members £7 (includes exhibition entry)
Tickets available soonArtist and author Edmund de Waal has curated an exhibition of acclaimed Danish ceramicist Axel Salto (1889 – 1961), presenting an unparalleled opportunity to experience the full range of Salto’s work, most never before seen in the UK. The exhibition includes a specially commissioned installation by de Waal inspired by Salto’s work and interests, highlighting the 20th-century master’s enduring influence.
In this talk, de Waal will reveal the richly imagined dialogue between himself and Salto – two artists who never met.
‘Axel Salto is one of the greatest artists of the twentieth century. He created a unique body of ceramic work that continues to fascinate me. His sculptures seem to be on the point of change: glazes are caught in flux. Vases swell as if to burst. He cared about the ways that patterns change course, shift energies, how an animal becomes a person, a man metamorphoses into a stag. Ovid ran powerfully through his life. That moment of change, transformation, is the moment when poetry occurs.’ Edmund de Waal
About Edmund de Waal
Edmund de Waal (b.1964) is an internationally acclaimed artist and writer, best known for his large-scale installations of porcelain vessels, often created in response to collections and archives or the history of a particular place. His interventions have been made for diverse spaces and museums worldwide. De Waal is also renowned for his bestselling family memoir, The Hare with Amber Eyes (2010), and The White Road (2015) and Letters to Camondo (2021). His latest book an Archive (2025), published with Ivorypress, is an archival gathering together of texts that reflect on both his own family archives and the archives of the writers, artists, and spaces that he has spent years inhabiting. He was awarded the Windham-Campbell Prize for non-fiction by Yale University in 2015. In 2021 he was awarded a CBE for his services to art. In 2024 he was awarded the Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres.
