Graham Taylor

Yeah.

Ceramics brings together all sorts of different bits and pieces and it's sort of the merging of the four ancient elements, you know, earth, air, fire, water.

And that's sort of appropriate because when you make clay things at a microscopic scale, you join in platelets together, etc.

So we sort of merge archaeology

Experimental archaeology and geology, because of course we're using the raw materials of the earth.

So you've sort of got an overlap of ologies going on.

And while I don't think there is a specific ology for making ceramic objects, it's on the cusp there of all sorts of things.

How long you got?

Basically, I grew up where we are now in Northumberland, and there's lots of archaeology everywhere, and I was always fascinated living in this landscape of the history of it.

I was one of these weird kids who would spend his time wandering around ancient monuments rather than going and playing football, you know.

But I also was artistic, but interested in science.

But I didn't want my science too sciency, I suppose.

So I ended up doing an arts foundation course, largely with the intention of doing graphics, because that was sort of what I knew.

Went into a ceramic studio and went,

Hey, this is it.

I don't really believe in any sort of spiritual stuff going on, but it was like I'd done it before.

It was like, you know, you sort of got that feeling of, yeah, yeah, this just feels right, just feels like the right thing.

And yeah, ceramics took me.

As an undergraduate student, I became interested in the idea that what I was doing had this heritage that went back thousands of years.

And in that, there were bits of technology which weren't really used anymore.

And I went in search of that in order to bring it into sort of contemporary practice.

So I was making teapots, cups, saucers, jugs, all the things.

I'm talking to American noise, pitchers, pitchers.

And in that, that developed into a hunt for ancient technology, right?

When I graduated, my wife and I both worked in the pottery at that stage, Sarah's mom.

And we ended up at a pottery in Scotland where we worked for three years and then got offered a job out in Lesotho in Southern Africa, where I found myself among people who were still making pots in the way people would have done here in the Neolithic.

They were digging their own clays, hand forming the pots, firing them in open fires.

And it was just wonderful to see that that technology was still alive and still being used.

And it sort of grew out of that.

And eventually, when I came back to the UK in the end, we set up a pottery workshop.

And yeah, that became the sort of thrust of the workshop.

As for Sarah joining in, well, yeah, I mean, she'll no doubt tell you, as a kid, they enjoyed the pottery workshop as somewhere to play and run around and jump into the piles of shredded paper that we had to pack the pots in and stuff like that.

But yeah.

And Sarah will tell you herself, she went off on a completely different route and came back to the pottery.

Basically, what happened was we had a Christmas dinner one year when I'd been ridiculously busy running all over the country doing demos and workshops and things like that.

And the kids said to me, Dad, you need an apprentice.

And I said, well, who'd want to work with me?

And Sarah very foolishly said she would.

So, yeah.

There's no such thing.

No such thing as a stupid question.

Well, it all starts with clay, I suppose, except that glass also sort of falls into the category of ceramic as well.

So it's a little bit blurred at the edges.

But basically, clay is an aluminum hydro silica.

So what does that mean?

Basically, it means that you've got this very strange material, which is composed of little flat platelets.

And those little flat platelets, when you add water to them, will glide over one another because their little chemical bonds are weak enough to let you shape them.

So it's this wonderful material that you can manipulate around and shape into things.

When you've dried it out, and you have to thoroughly dry it out, we might talk about fire and things later, what you've got is a pot which still has some chemically combined moisture in there.

And when you start to heat it up, the first few hundred degrees are really quite dangerous because it can turn to super steam in there and blow the whole thing apart.

And anybody who did pottery at school probably had their teacher tell them that they'd left air bubbles in the clay because their pot blew up and ruined everybody else's work.

And in actual fact, it's just the teacher was firing the kiln too darn fast.

That's all it is.

No guilt, no guilt.

But as you reach about 550 degrees Celsius...

those platelets start to melt together on the edges.

They start to fuse together at the edges.

And it's once you cross that boundary that you end up with ceramic.

You end up with pottery, which basically means that if you wet it again, it's not going to turn soft and moldable again.

And that takes you up to 550 Celsius.

Once you get higher, depending on the type of clay, those bonds start to fuse more and more and more until you get up into really high temperatures like 1,200, 1,300 Celsius.

And that demands special clays.

Fairly pure clays, what we'd call kaolinite, which is the stuff they dig up in Cornwall here, but originates with the Chinese porcelains in a place called Jingdezhen, where they were digging up this wonderful material, which you could heat up to these extremely high temperatures.

And it basically fuses the whole clay together, so much so, and you probably know with porcelain, if you hold it up to the light, you can see light through it.

It's just this wonderful material, which allows you to create things which are so remarkably hard.

And of course, here in Europe, sort of...

15th, 16th, 17th century, people went berserk for it.

I mean, to the extent they were paying huge sums of money for this stuff coming from China.

And I have a couple of little pieces from a shipwreck, which are very precious.

They're lovely little, so thin, so thinly made, so beautifully made.

And this, you know, takes me back to sort of what it is that makes us do this because most times when you're working on a piece, it ends up giving you this remarkable respect for these craftspeople of the past that they were producing this super fine, wonderful stuff or really elaborate pieces of work or they'd worked out special ways of making things.

Often when we're demonstrating at public venues and things like that, you will get somebody who comes along who in their question imply that,

How did these quite stupid people in the past manage to do this sort of thing?

And you go, no, no, no, no.

Recalibrate.

They understood things we don't understand anymore, and they knew about materials.

Yeah, they probably couldn't operate an iPhone, but at the same time, they could create these wonderful things.

And they would probably be able to learn how to operate the iPhone quicker than you'd be able to work out how to make this.

It's hot, you know.

So, yeah.

Well, here in Britain, the far south, we have the China clays, which drove the sort of industrial revolution, white and blue China that went all over the world.

This is not the only place you get China clays.

I mean, they're called China clays because originally they came from China.

But they are extremely pure clays in that

What kaolinite, this wonderful chemical that makes clay possible, is, is decomposed floor spa from granite.

So it's a volcanic rock which over millions of years has decomposed through other gases being forced up through it.

So in the north of Britain, you have what we call boulder clays, which tell you a lot about what the clay is like.

It's full of rocks.

But people have exploited that clay for thousands of years because if you wash it, if you mix it with lots of water and you settle it out, you can get a perfectly good clay.

But now it's got all the stuff mixed with it, mostly iron.

And the iron oxide is what makes terracotta.

It makes it red.

So the red clay comes out of the ground looking mucky brown is what it comes out of the ground looking, sometimes yellow.

But it'll fire to a beautiful red colour.

And depending on the amount of iron oxide in there and things, it'll fire red.

Primary clays, where they've been deposited at or near to where the granite decomposed, will often be white or light colours and light cream.

So, yes, over the whole world you will get different kinds of clay that are formed in different places.

Well, Scandinavia is not blessed with lots of clay, largely because of the mountainous nature of it.

It hasn't sort of yielded that.

As a result, when you look at, say, Viking pots, they're often made of soapstone.

They're often steatite or something like that.

So they're carving them rather than forming them from clay.

Yes, I do.

And I mean, what we often do is a lot of the time we are making pots that are going to be used for handling collections and for displays in museums or just for collectors around the world who want to put them on their shelves.

And we need to be certain of how they're going to behave.

So what we generally do in those cases is we are taking commercially prepared clays and messing them up.

The people who went to all the effort of getting these clays nice and clean would be horrified by what we do to the clays sometimes.

But I like working with quite gritty clays because I tend to make big clays.

sort of amphora and sort of larger pots and things.

But Sarah, of course, does very fine modelling and very fine sculpting.

So she does a lot of the figurines and stuff like that.

So she obviously works with a lot finer clay.

So I think we would debate what was the best clay.

Definitely it was...

This is a piece that the original of which is in what's called the Willits Collection in Brighton Museum.

There was just this wonderful, wonderful horse, which Sarah managed to make in our quite small workshop and fire in our single kiln without me knowing, which is a remarkable achievement.

I mean, it really was.

I mean, the idea of putting paper in clay might sound really weird.

But when you go back to Neolithic Bronze Age, Anglo-Saxon Viking pottery, they're using clays from the surface, from muddy puddles, etc.

That already has a lot of organic material in.

You know, I always say with a Bronze Age or a Neolithic potter, they wouldn't have had to look far for clay.

A lot of these people were driving animals in and out of fields or whatever every day.

Here in Britain, where it rains a lot, you're going to be driving them through muddy puddles.

You're going to spot where the clay is.

And of course, the animals are also helping you by adding organic material to the clay as they go.

And in fact, I mean, some pottery traditions, you do add animal dung to the clay to make it more workable, more plastic.

Not one of my favorite things to do, but you know, it works well.

Right.

I think you get a different answer from all sorts of different people.

For me, pottery and ceramics are almost synonymous with one another.

There are blurred edges.

And of course, we have high power engines made of ceramic now.

We have jet engines made of ceramic.

So it would be difficult to sort of define those as pottery.

Yeah, yeah, I've just done a pottery project.

I've built a jet engine, you know.

But I sort of classify it all.

I have a fascination with it all.

It began, really.

I was...

The first thing that happened really, when I got back to the UK with the family, I like that mug.

That's a nice, sorry.

Your listeners can't see that, but that is one heck of a mug.

That is a good one.

It is a good one.

I, to my shame, am sitting here with an industrial mug sitting next to me.

Yeah, they get broken.

They get broken.

Sorry, in answer to your original question, we came back to the UK and I'd sort of

had all these influences, including living in Lesotho for years and seeing ancient pottery made.

Came back and I started researching a little bit, really with the intention of doing more sculptural stuff.

And I got talking to the archaeologists at the Northumberland National Park, Rob Young and Paul Frodsham, who were at that stage busy digging a Bronze Age site in a valley just really close by.

They came to talk to me because they'd found within these huts some clay-lined pits and, of course, various bits of Bronze Age pottery and then some burial mounds in which grave goods in the form of pottery had been placed, including a rather beautiful Bronze Age urn, which very sadly had the cremated remains of a small child with enough skull fragments to know that it probably died of meningitis.

Oh, wow.

And even after 4,500 years, it's still poignant.

It still makes you go, wow, that's amazing.

And I said, yeah, I can.

Word got to the head of the National Park, and he came and he said, look, Prince Charles is visiting fairly soon.

Could you make a set of these to give to Prince Charles as a gift?

So our King Charles owns one of our sets.

So the Pope ended up with some of our pottery, Deng Xiaoping, who was then the leader of China, and I think Fidel Castro actually ended up with a piece as well.

So

These are our claims to fame.

Well, it was.

There were interesting bits and bits that were maybe more interesting than we would have liked at times.

So I just put it here because I knew that would come up at some stage.

28,000 years ago.

28,000 years ago.

That's a long time, but it's very late in human development.

It's really late in human development.

This is the first time we know of that anybody has taken a piece of clay and

deliberately formed it and then fired it.

There are bits of clay in caves that may be earlier, but they've not been fired.

And that was the key.

And a lot of the ones in the fire were broken, exploded in the fire.

And the debate was whether they were being made as some sort of sacrifice to the fire or whether they were being made to distribute.

Well, there are huge gaps is the problem.

Basically, we see these figurines and odd ones being produced around Europe.

The next real leap forward is in China and Japan.

And it's around about 19,000 years ago, you start to see the first pots that we know of.

One of the issues is, and the ones from China come from fairly deep in a cave.

Now, although people will still refer to Paleolithic people as cavemen, not many of them lived in caves.

So pots being found in a cave is quite special.

But pottery that has been fired as pottery before, sort of prehistoric pottery, is mostly fired in open fires, not in kilns, which means it only gets up to about 800 degrees C, 900 degrees C on a windy day.

It means it's not very firmly fired.

It's not very strongly fired.

rain, frost, ice will destroy it, completely destroy it.

So the likelihood of finding anything from that sort of deep time is quite unlikely.

you know, whenever I demonstrate, I demonstrate on a stick wheel, spun with a stick.

It's a momentum wheel because we know that the Romans used it.

We know the ancient Greeks used it.

We know medieval potters used it.

And it's the same sort of thing that would have been in use in southern Iraq about 3000 BC.

Gets to Britain with the Romans in 43 AD.

So, you know,

We were a little bit behind the game.

You don't want to rush into these things, though, do you?

You've got to be sure it's right for you.

I'm only laughing because it is the question that everybody asks.

Why is it pointed?

What do you want a pointed vessel for?

That's crazy.

They're pointed because their main function is to go into a ship.

They are vessels for carrying liquid products, mostly wine, olive oil, fish sauce.

But they also ship things like sort of dates and figs and things packed in honey.

And they're there to be shipped in an ancient Roman or Greek ship.

And the hull of that ship is, you know, hull-shaped.

It's sort of V-shaped.

there would be little in the way of flat surfaces.

And even if there were, this ship is going to be rolling around.

So what you need is something that allows you to fix those things into place.

And when you've got the timbers of the ship and other lats of wood nailed across those, you can leave gaps into which the pegs of the amphora go.

And the amphora are then stabilized and you

tie across all the tops with rope.

And there have been finds, I think, in the Mediterranean of ships where there is evidence still of weaving of rope or pieces of wood or whatever through the handles, and you ship them.

But there are other reasons.

From a potter's point of view, when you fire huge pots with big flat bottoms to them in what is an updraft kiln, now in a Roman or Greek kiln,

The fire is at the bottom of the kiln.

And then at the top, you close it off because you normally pack in from the top of the top of the kiln.

So the fire's at the bottom.

If you've got your pots packed in there with the flat bottoms on the bottom of the kiln, that bottom of that pot heats first.

And what it does first before it shrinks, it expands because it's being heated.

But the flames are heating the bottom faster than they're heating the sides.

So the sides don't expand as fast.

The danger of cracking is huge.

If your pot has a nice pointy base and is sort of aerodynamic, the flames pass up past it and they heat the whole pot and they heat it nice and evenly.

And they do so without the risk of cracking.

It's also the case that in the workshop that you can get pots crack in the bottom just because they dry too fast or whatever.

But a peg, peg makes sure that that won't happen.

And when they get to the other end, when they get to wherever they're going,

They can be picked up.

You pick up one handle.

You pick up the peg at the bottom.

Off you go with it.

You can pour it.

A single person can pour it, although, in fairness, the biggest ones were 13 1⁄2 gallons in a single vessel, 13 1⁄2 gallons of wine.

I always reckon that's half a hen party, isn't it?

In one vessel, that's it.

But you say you can pick it up, you can pour it.

And it has so many advantages.

We have the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford has some wonderful little statuettes of camels with amphora on the side of them.

And they are tied on.

by being tied across the handles at the top and round the pegs at the bottom and held onto the camel.

They have so many advantages that they remain the shape for carrying liquids for several thousand years.

And even in medieval Britain, you would still have wine from Europe that was coming in amphora that was still being produced even as late as that.

Salty water.

Yeah.

Basically, it originates with the tea ceremony in Japan.

It was a technique very tied in with Zen Buddhism.

And it was carving your tea bowl from a fairly solid lump of clay, hand-carved, and then glazed in often quite a thick, dark glaze.

But the things go into an extremely hot kiln.

which is not what you normally do.

Normally with pots, you heat them up gently, try not to blow them up, like we were talking about before, and then you let the kiln cool down nicely when you're finished.

This, you use tongs to get these pots in and out of the kiln.

In a matter of minutes, often not more than half an hour, a glazed pot fired in the kiln.

Now that comes out with all sorts of imperfections.

The glaze will bubble, you'll get sometimes cracks in the pot, which would often be fixed with the sort of Kintsugi technique where they're adding gold into the lacquer.

And it is this sort of concept that nature is heavily involved in the production of this vessel, that it takes a hand in it and it puts its imprint on the pot.

And that you will never, ever get two pieces which are exactly the same.

When I was a student, Raku was the thing.

But as a student, I loved it.

I absolutely loved it.

We used to do Raku firing sort of two or three times a term.

And we had a little Italian restaurant we used to go to after we'd Raku fired.

And they had a little dark corner at the pack where they would put us all because we absolutely stank of smoke and...

Because, I mean, in the sort of more updated technique, you often take the pots from the hot kiln and plunge them into sawdust or straw or, I mean, I've seen people now adding horse hair onto them and dropping them into water and all sorts of things.

So it's a very sort of visceral, sort of natural, powerful way of doing pots and great fun.

And Sarah, Sarah's really annoyed because her sister got to do it one time and she didn't.

You and George, my grandson, you had a little song you used to sing.

What exactly is it?

Well, glaze is essentially glass.

For real?

But there are sort of infinite boundaries between the sort of shiniest most beautiful sort of fine porcelain glaze and sort of Neolithic pots or the Pueblo Indian pots.

There are just beautiful, beautiful pieces that are made by using slips.

Now, a slip is basically a liquid clay.

But then you can start to add stuff to it.

You can add metal oxides to it so you can color that slip and make it darker or lighter.

Or in some cases, blue, green, you can get different colors by using things like cobalt oxide and chromium oxide.

Then you can start to add fluxes, things that will make them melt.

So soda ash, sodium carbonate, burned seaweed effectively is sort of one of the low temperature ones.

And as you sort of move up through doing the bits of chemistry, and I like the idea of the blending of art and science, but I didn't want my science too sciencey.

Well, this is very, very much the alchemist this is, you know, this is taking the ingredients and playing with them.

So glaze is effectively rock that has melted because you're melting silica, quartz, alumina, various different additives to those.

But those are sort of the foundations of your glaze.

But the trick with ceramics is you have to make, if you're going to get a glaze which doesn't crackle all over the place, you've got to make a glass that will shrink and expand at the same rate as the clay underneath it.

So that's where the clever chemistry comes in.

The interesting bit of working with sort of ancient pottery is they often didn't worry about that.

So it gives you a bit of free license there.

But at the same time, and going back to the Raku, people treasure the sort of crackled effects and things on those glazes.

So it basically is you're melting rock.

That's what you're doing.

And people learned to melt rock quite a long time ago, really.

Here in Britain, we have Roman pottery called Barbatine ware.

which is black-coated cups, often with hunt scenes on them.

And the hunt scenes are done by piping on slip, liquid clay, a bit like you would do cake icing in the form of animals or gladiators or things like that go around the cup.

And then they're dipped in a layer of what is probably the slag from an iron furnace that's been crushed back down and added onto the outside of it.

Because that's rock that they've already melted.

It'll melt again.

You apply it on the surface, get this beautiful black coating.

So the glaze can be anything.

And as a student, we had to make little tiles up with loads of different mixtures on them to test out what could be made as a glaze.

And some fool put a teabag onto a tile and put it in the kiln.

And it made the most beautiful little gem of green glaze.

Yeah, yeah.

Well, Sarah makes lots of molded figures and things.

And, of course, the molded figures that the Romans and the Greeks made are that sort of beginning of industrial pottery.

You make an archetype, you create a mold from it, and you press clay into it.

And it means that you just need in your workshop one person who is talented enough to create that archetype.

I've got Sarah.

And then you can get any old fool to bash the things out.

It's not quite true.

I mean, it is more technical than that.

Once you move up to the Industrial Revolution, people start to develop ways of basically almost throwing on a machine.

The first thing really is called a jigger-jolly machine, and you have the shape of, say, an inside of a plate or the inside of a bowl, and you put a slab of clay over the top of it, you spin it round, and it pushes it down onto the mold, and you've got your plate or bowl.

And the other way that a lot of industrial stuff was made is slip casting.

So that's you have a closed mold with a hole at the top into which you can pour liquid.

and you mix up liquid clay with something called a deflocculant.

It makes it so the clay doesn't shrink too much.

You pour that into the mould, you leave it in there for a few minutes, you pour it back out again, and what you've got is a thin skin on the inside of the mould.

And as that dries, you can pull the mould apart, and you've got your pot.

So those are two ways that industrial pots were traditionally made.

These days, quite a lot of industrial pots are made with dry powder.

Clay has two kinds of moisture.

It has the moisture that makes it

moldable and it has moisture that's chemically combined and if you press it hard enough you can get that chemically combined moisture to do some of the work and join it together so you can take what is effectively gyre powder clay slam a huge press onto it and come out with a plate or a bowl or whatever and uh quite a lot of industrial pottery is made under high power pressures

So yeah, machines.

Basically, nothing that you're buying from a reputable dealer should contain free lead in any way.

We occasionally use what's called a lead fritted glaze on the outside of a medieval pot, but we try not to use it on the inside of any vessels.

And in fact, the medieval potters generally didn't.

They left that out.

But a frit is a glass.

So people will drink their whiskey out of their lead crystal glass quite happily.

Well, that's effectively what you're doing when you frit lead.

You mix it up, you melt it into a glass, and then you grind it back down into a powder.

And then you use it as the glaze, and it'll glaze the outside of the pot.

We only do that for a few museum replica medieval pots because...

Almost everything we make is unglazed.

But yes, lead was commonly used and lead was used in the form of crushed down lead ore.

And while in the lead ore form, I am told it's not terribly body soluble.

When the potters fired those pots, the fumes coming off the kiln were certainly lead laden.

And if the pots weren't fired properly, the residue on the surface of the pots could be lead-laden.

I was demonstrating on said stick potter's wheel at a festival at Dover Castle a few years ago when a lady snuck up behind me and decided to try and emulate me.

I'll be honest, I really can't remember.

But if you're listening, hi.

I mean, it's a scene.

I got a feeling that the pottery wasn't the main focus of that scene, really.

Nice, nice.

Basically, the earliest pottery is pretty much made from what you dig out the ground.

They're going to be pretty much contaminated with grits and rocks and bits and pieces.

That was the clay they would have used to make the pots.

Now, clay shrinks as it dries.

So as it shrinks, it pulls away from the grit a little bit and it leaves little fissures, little

gaps through the clay through which moisture can escape the pot.

So when you've got a really gritty clay and one with a lot of organic material in it, which we were talking about before, as that burns out, you're left with even more cavities.

It gets the chance for the moisture to escape.

People would have found that as they started to purify clays and make them finer and nicer and smoother to use, it became more difficult to fire them.

And if you want clay that's going to fire easily, as you would in making, for instance, amphora, because you're going to make hundreds and thousands of them and you don't want to mess about being so delicate firing them, you're going to realize that the gritty clay was actually what was helping you to get them through the firing process.

The other advantage that grog has over any other kind of grit is its expansion and contraction rate in the fired pot is going to be exactly the same as the ripot because it's made from exactly the same material.

So I think people would have sort of come to this bit by bit as a process.

You know, I was talking to an archaeologist just a couple of days ago about middens.

Middens.

Middens that you find at Bronze Age, Neolithic, whatever sites, that sort of look as if they haven't just formed in one nice even layer.

They look as if they've been churned up.

But the reason they're churned up is because I think prehistoric people viewed middens as recycling centres.

You put stuff there until you need some of it again.

And I'm sure that was the case with pottery bits, pottery fragments.

They get put there, they get dragged out, they get crushed down, they get added into the clay.

Of course, there are cultures in the world which add granny's pots back into your pots for the heritage continuation, for that idea that you are bringing the spirit of granny's pots into your pots.

And

I'm saying granny's pots because actually sub-Saharan Africa, it's almost entirely women that make pots.

And north of the Sahara, it tended to move more towards men.

And it's sort of, I think it's as soon as machines start to be involved, boys and their toys and they want to play with it.

This is where Claire comes in.

I mean, one of the things, we're definitely not going to run out of clay.

The earth is fairly abundant in clay.

We've got lots of the stuff.

I suppose for me, I've become more and more conscious every time I pack a kiln of getting as much stuff as I possibly can into each firing because I know I'm using energy and I know I'm using

quite a lot of energy in a single fire.

So it has become a sort of thing of trying to make sure that we're as low impact as we possibly can be.

I mean, clay is wonderful because basically, as you've pointed out, it can be turned into grog even once it's been fired.

But until it's fired, it's infinitely recyclable.

You wet it down again, you use it again, you keep going.

And certainly our waste output from the workshop is minimal.

Our packing materials are now all sort of biodegradable, etc., etc.,

But it is that sort of realization of we've got to be as efficient as we possibly can be with the energy resources we're using.

And we're leaving something for the next generation that they want.

Well, for me, I got a phone call from Stonehenge about three years ago.

they were running an exhibition called Circles of Stone.

And what it was doing was comparing what was going on at Stonehenge at the time it was being built with what was going on in Japan in the Jomon period.

If you listeners don't know what they look like, go and look up Jomon, J-O-M-O-N, flame pots and be amazed because these were Neolithic people.

Apparently, we are told making cooking pots

And they are the most elaborate pieces you will ever see in your life, I think.

And Stonehenge was asking us to make a replica of the flame pots and some of the figurines, which Sarah did.

But the flame pot is the most brain-cracking, challenging, probably, piece that I've ever made.

And I loved it.

I absolutely loved it.

The only trouble is they take about a week to make.

And I won't be making an awful lot of them.

But

Again, it's going back to that, here we have somebody from the ancient past just really showing off.

I always sort of say that ancient Greek potters were showing off.

The black and red figureware is showing off.

The Japanese, they were doing it 2,000 years earlier.

It's been wonderful, Ali.