In 2002 Edmund de Waal made an installation for the Geffrye Museum in east London called Porcelain Room. It was, he says, his first real stake in the ground – an exquisite wall of porcelain with about 400 pots and an attic space above. The exhibition travelled around in various formats before it was bought in its entirety by a collector and adapted for her home. From then on, de Waal’s pots were no longer sold individually – you could only buy the whole lot.

Since then, de Waal has exhibited all over the world, from the V&A in London to the Frick Collection in New York; he has had commercial shows, but often his installations are responses to existing collections of museums, galleries and other spaces – such as Chatsworth, or the Canton Synagogue in Venice. He has given talks in libraries, galleries and museums, and written three books; the first of these, The Hare with Amber Eyes, has been translated into 30 languages and sold more than a million and a half copies, won several awards and been the basis for an exhibition at the Jewish Museum in New York.

De Waal’s studio, in south London, is an extensive, open space, filled with light and quiet music – it might be the Goldberg Variations or Philip Glass or John Adams’s Shaker Loops, depending on his agenda. The studio has different portals according to what he is doing – ‘it’s perpetual motion’ – writing, throwing pots, curating, kilning. No day is the same. He might be testing techniques – honing porcelain until it becomes so ethereal you can almost see through it, or inscribing text into it, or trimming it, or writing something to accompany an exhibition he has curated, or simply sitting by the kiln drinking very strong coffee and listening to the pots creak as they cool.

There is no day when only a single activity takes place. ‘I plan and plan and plan 
and have it all mapped out – and then it doesn’t work,’ de Waal says. ‘I’ll find myself up at two in the morning, writing something or other. Every making or curating project, or exhibiting project, also involves writing. So I have to move from the making bit of the studio to the writing bit. The writing often takes a lot longer, and I’m too old to be up in the middle of the night.’

But, he says, there’s always time for the making: ‘My heart is very, very open to that.’

Is that because it’s more physical? Or because you are actually a potter? He laughs. Edmund de Waal is many things – but at heart, he says, ‘I am a potter.’ He is not a ‘ceramic artist’ or a ‘ceramist’ or an ‘artist in clay’. ‘If you push me against the wall and ask me what I do, I would say, “I make pots.”’

There’s something honourable, he thinks, about making a pot out of clay. But there is poetry in his vessels. And in his writing too. His last book, Letters to Camondo, is a small companion to his 2010 bestseller The Hare with Amber Eyes in that it is about art collector Moïse de Camondo, a neighbour of de Waal’s great-great-grandfather’s cousin, Charles Ephrussi, the subject of The Hare, whose son died fighting in the First World War.

De Waal reads the audio version of the book himself, and he reads as he speaks – with great momentum. He sounds as if he’s on the verge of discovery, the discovery of something enormous, his enthusiasm tempered by curiosity.

This autumn de Waal has many things on the go. September saw the opening of two shows at different branches of Gagosian in New York – one uptown, one downtown. this must be the place is inspired by the work of poets and is 
his first at Gagosian for more than a decade, ‘Because it’s all about places – strong, identified places. There will be things which weigh absolutely nothing’ – he shows me a translucent porcelain tile, the result of hours of honing. And huge, heavy things, such as benches of black Kilkenny Marble, mined from a quarry the size of 10 football pitches. It’s actually limestone embedded with fossilised shells and carved by one of his regular collaborators, the sculptor Corin Johnson. ‘And you can sit on them, for God’s sake! Everyone needs a place to sit down, but most galleries are so bad at that. It’s about saying, “You can stay a bit longer.”’

‘The stone is full of fossils,’ he goes on, ‘and we cut into them and inserted bits of silver. It’s like pushing a poem or a prayer into a wall and leaving it there. This idea of insertion happens a lot in my work – writing on something, then folding it, breaking it into shards, putting it into something else. It relates to old histories and archives and the idea of finding something through happenstance; not knowing if something will survive but putting it out into the world one way or another.’ It’s a typical de Waal perspective. As Francis Bacon said, ‘The job of the artist is always to deepen the mystery.’

So that’s downtown. The uptown one is a collaboration with the American photographer and writer Sally Mann. The title of the exhibition is to light, and then return– , after a line of a poem Emily Dickinson wrote on a scrap of envelope. Composed of sculptures by de Waal and prints by Mann along themes of ‘elegy and historical reckoning’, there are porcelain vessels juxtaposed with blocks and tiles, platinum, silver and steel grouped in wall-mounted vitrines, the titles alluding to poems by Seamus Heaney and Osip Mandelstam as well as Dickinson. Mann’s prints show fragments of tombstones near her home in Lexington, Virginia, and still-life arrangements of wooden and metal tools, using a 19th-century photographic process.

It was Mann’s friend the artist Cy Twombly who gave her a copy of The Hare with Amber Eyes soon after it came out, and she and de Waal started corresponding. They have been in touch ever since. ‘Our ticket has been punched by the same conductor,’ Mann has said of their bond. Today she says, ‘Throwing a pot is based on the intuition of actual touch, how an edge creates or loses tension, but there are times taking a picture that I feel it, and find the objects in the picture moved into place almost as if by a spirit hand.’

Both have always been totally absorbed by poetry. ‘And we’ve always had this interesting friendship, looking at what the other person does – not directly talking about the work, but sharing books and poems and things in between,’ says de Waal. ‘There is this fantastic energised space in our friendship of just sharing stuff.’ So this is them sharing stuff together in public. And there will be a book.

Then, in October, de Waal is curating a huge show of work by the Danish artist Axel Salto in Denmark, which will be on for almost a year, before moving to Norway, then the Hepworth Wakefield. Salto – a potter, poet and artist, who de Waal describes as ‘one of the greatest artists of the 20th century’ – died in 1961.

We are sitting at a table in de Waal’s studio, drinking coffee. There is a visceral-looking knobbly vase between us. It’s a Salto, which he bought. ‘All his glazes have this extraordinary molten quality to them,’ he says, picking up the piece. ‘They’re kind of bonkers, and sanguine at the same time, and feel fantastically good in the hand.’

De Waal was invited to curate the show by a Norwegian collector and philanthropist, Nicolai Tangen, who has the biggest collection of Salto’s works in the world. ‘We were just rabbitting to each other about what we loved, and Nicolai said, “There’s never been a big, interesting exhibition to introduce him to the world – not a kind of po-faced cultural history thing, more of an, “Oh my God! Get your hands on this!”

‘His big thing was metamorphosis – how things change from one thing to another in ceramics, which is what I’ve been banging on about for years – and about risk, about not knowing what is going to happen.’ The result of all this is Playing with Fire, which opens tomorrow at the Clay Museum of Ceramic Art Denmark.

De Waal gives me a little tour of the studio; seven people work here. ‘Three of them are makers [who have their own artistic practices as well]. There’s a lot of material knowledge in this studio; lots of testing, and an ebb and flow of ideas – for instance we’ve been trying to work out how to let light in through porcelain – ethereal, translucent porcelain tiles – scraping them back and writing text into them – which is kind of beautiful but not quite right yet.’

We pass a little dish of delicately gilded buttons, with text ingrained in the porcelain – de Waal’s contribution to an exhibition called Artists’ Buttons in honour of the late British ceramicist and button maker Lucie Rie, another of de Waal’s favourites. Bespoke buttons have been created by artists including Ai Weiwei, Cornelia Parker and Antony Gormley, on sale via Kettle’s Yard in Cambridge and on show at Loewe, London, from 11 to 15 October.

He shows me the kiln room. It’s all about alchemy – and indeed here on the wall is a photograph by Patti Smith of an alchemist’s workshop in Meissen. De Waal runs his hand across a sheet of the finest porcelain. ‘There’s a lot of testing – and testing is important because there’s a thin line between something being breath­takingly lambent and exhilarating and something which is eye-stretchingly horrible,’ he says.

Edmund de Waal sprang from an unusual and esoteric background, surrounded by grand buildings and Gothic spaces and scholarly atmospheres. Born in 1964, he is the son of the Rev Victor de Waal, dean of Canterbury Cathedral for 10 years, and Esther Moir, a historian. One of four boys, Edmund grew up first in Lincoln in a huge, unheated medieval house next to Lincoln Cathedral, which nurtured his fascination with spaces and buildings. When he was five, his father went to an evening class in pottery, and took Edmund along. It was a revelation; de Waal can still remember his first pot, and realising that he’d found his vocation.

At the King’s School in Canterbury, he had a teacher who was an elderly potter called Geoffrey Whiting, and every afternoon he would go to his house to learn to make pots. When he was 17, having been accepted by Cambridge to study English literature, he took two years out and went to work for Whiting as an apprentice, sweeping clay floors and scraping asbestos walls (long before health and safety considerations; his lungs are still damaged), while Whiting sat at his wheel with a Capstan Full Strength hanging out of his mouth.

De Waal was a dedicated student. And what Whiting instilled in him, for which he is eternally grateful, is the sense of working really hard at something for a long time. Whiting was a disciple of Bernard Leach, the definitive potter of the 20th century, and made functional pots in blues and greys and browns.

After university, de Waal moved to Sheffield, having discovered that it was the cheapest place to live, and became an urban potter. Then he started, very gradually, to work in porcelain. And it changed everything. Porcelain would become a lifelong obsession that he explored intensively in his 2015 book, The White Road. Porcelain is expensive, and a treacherous material to work with, but it has beautiful and unique qualities, and above all it is white. Despite its unforgiving nature, de Waal considered it a poetic material, and trained himself to make functional pots out of porcelain.

In 1991 de Waal had an invitation to go to Japan on a two-year scholarship. Mornings were spent at a language school, afternoons working in a ceramics studio, or in an archive, studying Leach.

When you were a young potter, I ask him, how did you think your career would turn out? ‘I thought I would do exactly what I was supposed to do,’ he says. ‘Which was to very modestly make functional pots.’ He smiles, and admits that his early work featured ‘heavy, preachy pots’.

‘When I went to Japan, that’s what I was trying to form – and there is something very honourable about that, though it’s quite a moralistic pathway in some ways, telling people what they should and shouldn’t eat off: these are the vessels which will bring a modesty to your living and connect you to proper values.’

By this time he had got together with his future wife, Sue Chandler, whom he had met at Cambridge (they married in 1997 and have three children, Ben, 25, Matthew, 24, and Anna, 21). She was working for Save the Children in Tibet, and they could communicate only by letter, so for company Edmund would visit his great-uncle Iggie (Ignace Ephrussi), who had moved to Tokyo in 1947, and it was here that he first saw the collection of 264 netsuke (miniature Japanese carvings), which had passed through several generations and become the subject of The Hare with Amber Eyes.

The book was a story of restitution, beginning with his great-great-uncle Charles Ephrussi (a French critic, art collector and historian), and ending in Japan with Uncle Iggie; it traced the story of how the netsuke collection evaded being appropriated by the Nazis and lay hidden in the mattress of a devoted housemaid before being restored to the family. The book took five years to write and became, unexpectedly, a monumental bestseller. De Waal gave talks everywhere from the Jewish Museum London to the Sydney Opera House, each one different, each one impassioned, and all received an overwhelming response from people with their own tales to tell.

In November 2019 the de Waal family, including his father, then 90, travelled to the Ephrussi Palace for a reunion, gathering for the first time since 1938. His father, who gave a speech in English and German, had his citizenship returned to him, his family having been stripped of it when they fled Vienna before the war.

After the 2021 exhibition in New York featuring works by Fragonard, Monet and Renoir from the Ephrussi collection, as well as the netsuke, ‘a man turned up with a letter from 1936, and a netsuke. He said, “Your great-grandfather gave this to my great-grandfather to thank him for his service working in the bank.” There are always extraordinary moments emerging, some of which are painful.’ De Waal sold 79 of the famed netsuke collection in 2018, prompted by what he described as ‘a moment of crisis in Europe’ – raising almost £80,000 for the Refugee Council: ‘We felt it was a positive thing to do.’ The remainder of the collection is now on loan to the Jewish Museum Vienna.

De Waal is so prolific that his life sounds exhausting, but he hums with creativity; these past few months spent in the studio have had, he says, ‘a mucking around quality which is so nice – I’m really, really, really enjoying it – I can’t remember a more creative bit of time, actually. I think this is absolutely about playing.’ He laughs. ‘There is a “what the heck” quality that I really like…’ But, actually, he concedes, you have to have lots of skills to be able to say what the heck – and make it work.

Edmund de Waal is taking part in the Art of Wishes Charity Gala at the OWO, London SW1, on Monday