Graham Taylor

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.