Quartz Inversion captures the work and reflections of over 60 international ceramists—what they were making and thinking—during the early months of the Coronavirus pandemic.
We launched QI Round One in June 2020, soon after the global lockdown took hold. The artists in this cohort discuss their responses to the pandemic’s first phase, with its ‘shelter in place’ orders, limited access to studios, and abrupt pivot from in-person to remote teaching.
QI Round Two was launched in December 2020, as the ‘second wave’ of the Coronavirus was accelerating, with renewed lockdowns in the UK and parts of the US and Europe. Each Round Two artist was nominated by an artist in Round One.
The early months of the COVID-19 pandemic were a period of extraordinary change. Analogous, perhaps, to quartz inversion in ceramics: the shift that occurs during firing, at 573 degrees Centigrade. At that temperature, quartz crystal changes its structure (from alpha to beta), with an accompanying change in volume—expanding as the kiln temperature rises, contracting again as it falls. If clay is cooled too fast as it passes through this critical temperature, it cracks.
We wanted to know how ceramists around the world were coping during the Pandemic, so we asked them the following questions:
• How is your work changing during lockdown? Has your process changed? Has the conceptual basis of your studio practice also begun to change?
• What kinds of materials/processes are you trying out, or making do with—because your regular studio, kilns, and supplies are currently inaccessible, or for other reasons?
• Are you taking this enforced time-out as a chance to plant seeds for the future, or are you happy continuing what you have already been working on/with?
• What unforeseen freedoms have you experienced during the “Great Pause”? What discoveries will you want to hold onto, whatever the “new normal” turns out to be?
• What can you, as an artist, articulate about what the world is going through?
Many of our invited artists are also educators who had to figure out, on the fly, how to teach ceramics (an intrinsically tactile, hands-on discipline) online. Several are parents of children whom they were home-schooling during the pandemic. We encouraged them to talk about these pedagogical shifts, and explain how they have managed to dovetail these new teaching responsibilities with their own ongoing studio practice.