Graham Taylor

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.