A workbench in order is not a tidy bench. It is a bench where everything can be found without thinking: the needle tool to the right of the wheel, the ribs in a row by size, the sponge in its dish, the bats stacked where the morning light reaches them. Tomas Herrera clears the bench at the end of every day, scraping the wood clean and returning each tool to its place. Visitors mistake the ritual for tidiness; the potter calls it memory. The bench remembers where the hands will look tomorrow. The plaster bats are the bench's furniture — square, patient, soaking up moisture from a hundred thrown bases. They are marked on the edge with the dates they were cast, and the oldest ones have worn into slight hollows, like thresholds. An orderly bench is not the enemy of mess; it is the arrangement that makes mess possible. You can throw with abandon when you know exactly where the needle tool is.