Clay, Held

A vessel that is picked up forty times a day has its handle placed by hand, not by a rule. Potters in Jingdezhen, Oaxaca and Puglia arrived at similar answers separately, and this exhibition puts their pieces on one long open shelf so the convergences are visible without a caption.

A second table shows the same forms redrawn for production: the tolerances added, the undercuts removed, the wall thicknesses standardised. Six of the redrawings were rejected by the original makers, and their written reasons are shown next to the drawings.

The exhibition closes with the royalty agreements, printed in full, because the terms are the part of this exchange that usually goes unrecorded.