Rue du Gros-Horloge Rouen

A gilded clock with a single hand keeps the hour above this lane in old Rouen. The Gros-Horloge has straddled the street on its Renaissance arch since 1527, though the works behind the dial were running more than a century before that. The street runs from the cathedral square to the old market, the Place du Vieux-Marché, where Joan of Arc was burned in 1431, a short walk away. Half-timbered houses lean over the arch in colombage rows. The street has been pedestrian since the early seventies, one of the first in France. Shoppers pass under the clock without looking up. The clock does not mind.

Slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, in our family studio in Knoxville, Tennessee.