Graham Taylor

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.