Quartz Inversion: Curatorial Statement

When future generations speak of 2020, let’s hope they don’t call it The Pandemic Year, but remember it, instead, as The Great Pause.

As the macabre clickety-click of COVID-19 cases detected…COVID-19 deaths…COVID-19 recoveries keeps changing around the world, and as new phrases creep into our daily vocabulary (social isolation, lockdown, pandemic, quarantine, work-from-home, Zoom, essential workers), it’s hard not to wonder where we stand, as artists, in this scenario.

Where does art feature, in a pandemic? Is art even needed at a time like this?

(A June 2020 poll by Singapore’s Straits Times ranked “Artist” as the Number 1 Non-Essential Job.)

These were the overarching questions that hovered as we formulated Quartz Inversion.

COVID-19 spurred us to reach out to our fellow artists for their responses, to create a matrix of collective ceramic intelligence.

When we sent out our initial invitation, several artists replied that they weren’t in a position, or mood, to join the project, for various reasons—some physical, some emotional, some practical (e.g. pressing deadlines for upcoming, as-yet-not-canceled exhibitions).

Many of our invitees couldn’t access their usual studios and kilns, and were busy adapting to working in other spaces, including their own homes or garages, with whatever materials were at their disposal.

Several explained that they were juggling their “normal” academic responsibilities (university courses abruptly shifted from physical classrooms to Zoom) with home-schooling of their young children, and attempting to keep their studio practices going in the crevices between these activities.

Some said they felt blessed to have a studio attached to their home, so life and work could go on more or less as usual—or as ‘usual’ as usual gets at exceptional times like these.

Several thanked us for nudging them (back) into work-mode, grateful for the clarifying focus of a deadline, to submit their portfolios of “pre-pandemic” and “lockdown” work for Quartz Inversion.

This project, they told us, was helping take their minds off the prevailing swirl of uncertainties— about health, future sources of income, the sudden transformation of teaching (especially with such a tactile, materially-based discipline as ceramics); whether museums, galleries and universities would ever go back to functioning the way they did before the pandemic struck; and what these bedrock cultural and educational institutions might be evolving into…

The natural environment provided some hints as to how the Great Pause could give rise to the Great Revival, if we would only give it a chance. Mountain ranges magically came back into view, as urban air pollution dropped dramatically; various animal species came out of their usual habitats to reclaim urban spaces and frolic in national parks, with humans banished from these spaces during the lockdown; birdsong flourished in cities where avian conversation had hitherto been drowned out by urban din. There was hope to be gleaned from these signals…even as the constant wail of ambulance sirens scythed through the unaccustomed silence of locked-down city streets.

Quartz Inversion offers insights into how artists have been experiencing the Great Pause, and the questions we’re asking ourselves as we shift our studio practices and our pedagogical strategies in response to the unprecedented (and unanticipated) changes of the last few months. As Kim Stanley Robinson wrote in The New Yorker, “The virus is rewriting our imaginations.”

We hope this site will continue to provide food for thought as the artists in Round One pass the baton to their nominees in Round Two…and as we all do our best to negotiate “the new normal.”