Jan was very stuck by the dynamism of the period, where so many developments took place very rapidly. In a number of pieces she noticed a tension being set up between the form and the decoration, arising from the way in which the glaze was not always sympathetic to the form. Her starting point was the Whieldon plates, with their neat scalloped edges and the tortoise-shell applied over it.

'I realized that this was a period of time when there were a lot of dynamic things happening in techniques and glazing and production and making methods. This development seemed to take two separate strands, one was the making techniques and the other was the surface decoration, and I think it slowly occurred to me that I was particularly interested in this juxtaposition where the two things had developed, but not in unison...... so it was this tension that I decided was possibly giving the vessel or the plate a dynamic and a life.'