This collection started with a folder of drawings taken to Hang Dong and taken apart within the hour, by artisans who had never seen my work and had no reason to be gentle about it. After years of designing alone, every decision argued internally and sent out finished, I found the correction unfamiliar: a warped bowl from the Bát Tràng kiln better than my clean edges, silk refusing what the sample promised, rattan bending only so far before it forgets. The collection stopped being mine alone, and I was taught again.

I went out to Bát Tràng on a free afternoon with no list and no camera, and stayed until the closing moment. What stayed with me was not any single bowl. It was the sound of a hand passing over a spinning block of clay, and the way nobody in the yard treated the work as precious. It was simply work, done well, by people who had been doing it for years...

She learned the loom before she learned to read, which is not a figure of speech in Van Phuc. The frame stood in the front room of her father's house, and the shuttle made a sound like rain on a tin roof, and she fell asleep to it for eighteen years before anyone thought to ask whether she wanted the work.