Wedgwood Jasper Ware
I did a student placement with the Wedgwood Design Studio in 1996. I worked with the famous Jasper body. Josiah Wedgwood spent years of his life trying to develop the coloured clay body also known as Wedgwood blue. Wedgwood suggested that it nearly drove him mad. In the factory Museum at Barlaston, just out of Stoke on Trent, there is a cabinet of the hundreds of test tiles he made in his search. Each of the tiles is inscribed with the neat copperplate hand that is recognisable  in Josiah Wedgwoods signature on the bottom of  Wedgwood pottery. It was a strange feeling, in that recognition, I felt close to one of the greatest figures of the industrial world. He was a potter just like me, and he worried over his tests just the same as me and all potters before and since who did not accept traditions and recipes as given.