On the White Road by Edmund de Waal – limited edition

Edmund de Waal is a British writer and artist known for his fascination with the history and potential of ceramics. Practicing as a ceramicist since childhood, de Waal has exhibited major installations at V&A, Tate Britain, the Fitzwilliam Museum, and the Kunsthistoriches Museum amongst many others, often creating works that respond to the collections, archives, and history of a physical place. De Waal was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2021 in recognition of his contribution to literature. His bestselling family memoir The Hare with the Amber Eyes: A Hidden Inheritance traces the journey of a collection of 264 miniature Japanese netsuke sculptures that were hidden in a mattress to avoid confiscation by the Nazis in Vienna during the second world war, and subsequently handed down through five generations of de Waal’s family. This bestselling family memoir was followed by various publications relating to the world of ceramics, including The White Road, which follows de Waal’s investigation into the history of porcelain, from the hills of Jingdezhen, China to the development of porcelain manufacture in Dresden, Germany and the pioneers of English porcelain, William Cookworthy and Josiah Wedgwood. This work in turn inspired de Waal’s most recent collaboration with the V&A, On the White Road, a limited-edition series of plates created in reference to significant objects in the museum’s world-renown ceramics collection.