Graham Taylor

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.