Edmund de Waal’s The Pot Book celebrated in Marylebone
Phaidon Press marked the publication of Edmund de Waal's landmark volume on ceramic vessels with an evening at Concord London's Rossetti Penthouse, gathering artists and visionaries to honour the enduring power of clay across cultures and centuries.
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The Rossetti Penthouse at Concord London’s Marylebone Square provided an intimate setting for the unveiling of Edmund de Waal’s The Pot Book, a comprehensive exploration of ceramic vessels through history and across continents. Phaidon Press brought together a constellation of ceramicists, artists and collectors to honour a medium whose quiet resilience has shaped human culture for millennia.
The book itself, bound in dusky rose with a terracotta vessel rendered on its spine, sits as both object and thesis. De Waal’s text surveys the pot across every epoch and geography, tracing how these formed vessels carry within them the fingerprints of civilisation. From ancient ritual to contemporary practice, the volume captures ceramics not as decorative afterthought but as fundamental to how societies understand craft, containment and beauty.
Among those gathered were fellow ceramicists Shahpour Pouyan, Bisila Noha, Jennifer Lee and Nao Matsunaga, each bringing their own dialogue with clay to the conversation. The evening unfolded as something between salon and scholarly exchange, the kind of gathering where ideas move as freely as conversation, and where the tactile knowledge of the hand is understood as equal to the written word.
The Pot Book is available through Phaidon Press, a publisher whose imprint has long anchored itself in the meticulous documentation of visual culture and craft traditions. This volume joins a lineage of books that treat their subjects not as trends to be consumed but as enduring conversations between maker, material and meaning.
Imagery courtesy of Phaidon Press (@phaidonpress).
