Graham Taylor

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.