De Waal’s work is at once thematically complex and formally elemental. This unusual compound has widened his popularity and made the work relevant to a variety of cultural discourses. Sarah Anderson, author of The Lost Art of Silence, has discussed de Waal’s work in relation to silence:

'He actively thinks about how to make silence—when he is making a bowl, he is making “silence” […]. Much poetry goes into de Waal’s silent pots: “My life is full of silences,” he says, and he refers to both poets and painters who help him achieve this silence, including Paul Celan (whose poetry focuses on the silence of annihilation); Wallace Stevens’s The House Was Quiet and the World Was Calm; Osip Mandelstam’s “When on the squares and in solitary silence, We slowly go out of our minds”; Sappho, “For when I gaze at you fleetingly, I can no longer utter a sound,” and Proust.'

In de Waal’s imaginative handling of studio pottery, ceramic vessels overflow with connotations. He frequently conceives of his ceramic installations as metaphors, with literary titles implying not merely a poetic handling of his material but rather a like-for-like conception of the ceramic installation as if it were in fact a poem or some other text. A metaphor cannot be paraphrased, and de Waal’s work often conveys its meaning by allusion—pointing outwards to sources of poetry or prose that contain analogous ideas. An installation of de Waal’s is never obviously symbolic or representational, and the formal qualities of his work—rich with variations of glaze, thickness, shape, arrangement—are indebted to a personal idiom. But his framework, arranging ceramic vessels in partially enclosed cabinets, has proved itself highly flexible and capable of conveying a wide variety of ideas and preoccupations.