Why is there a number on the base? Every piece in this project carries its sequence number on its base, written by hand. The number isn’t decoration — it’s the piece’s identity and its price: piece 2,254 is listed at $22.54, because the price of any piece is its number times one cent. Turn the piece over and you’re reading both its place in the 10,000-piece archive and its price tag.
Three marking styles
The pieces documented so far show three ways the number gets onto the base:
- Hand-painted — the number brushed on in dark pigment (2250, 2251, 2252, 2253)
- Incised — the number carved directly into the clay (2254, 2255, 2256 and onward through 2260; also 1697 in the wild-clay stretch)
- Handwritten — the number written on the bare base in a medium the photos don’t identify (2085, 2091 among the abstract cups)
In the 2250–2260 range, the switch from painted to incised happens between pieces 2253 and 2254 — in the middle of the June 16 photography session, not at a session boundary. Six pieces photographed the same day split across both styles. Whether either style is the rule for the wider 10,000-piece run isn’t something these eleven pieces can establish; they only show that the convention was changing right here.
Why it’s worth looking at
A numbered base is the project’s whole mechanism in miniature: the archive (this number exists once), the ledger (the number is the price), and the hand (no two numerals are written alike).
See it on real pieces
2253 (painted, the last of the painted run) · 2254 (incised, the first switch) · 2085 (handwritten) · or browse painted-number pieces, incised-number pieces, and handwritten-number pieces.
Each piece page links to its live listing on the Shopify store — the purchase path for every piece.