It all started with a visit to the Danish Design Museum in Copenhagen about 30 years ago. British potter Edmund de Waal was faced with an old-fashioned display case with a dense grouping of Axel Salto’s ceramics. There they were, side by side, these strange vessels with spikes and glazes that seemed to be moving as if still in flux; odd things that avoided anything he had ever seen before. They were not traditional vessels with decorations on the outside, but were somewhere in between inside and out. They were vases that seemed to be ‘growing on the spot’, as Axel Salto puts it.
Edmund de Waal was confused, and felt anxious and unsettled. For the first time he was encountering ceramics he did not understand. 10 years later, in his book published in 2003, he wrote about Salto as part of a group of post-war existentialists who had to deal with the anxiety and uncertainty of the 1950s. However, this is only part of the truth in understanding the art of this Danish master of stoneware who de Waal likes to call “one of the greatest ceramic
