Quartz Inversion
Quartz Inversion

Quartz Inversion is conceived and curated by artists Janet Abrams and Adil Writer—based, respectively, in Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA, and Auroville, Tamil Nadu, India.

We first met in spring 2019, when Janet traveled to Pondicherry, in southeast India, to write an article about Golden Bridge Pottery, its apprenticeship program, and its broad influence on contemporary Indian ceramics, for the July-August 2019 issue of Crafts, the magazine of the UK Crafts Council.

Talking over WhatsApp, during the early weeks of the Coronavirus pandemic, we soon found ourselves discussing how to document what we and our fellow ceramic artists were up to during this unprecedented period. Given our different geographic vantage points—the US Southwest and the southeast of India—and hence our different networks within the world(s) of ceramics, we realized that we could assemble a truly international roster of ceramic artists, and present a global perspective on how they are adapting to the present moment. Read how Quartz Inversion came about in our Curatorial Statement.

 
Janet Abrams, co-curator of Quartz Inversion, editor/producer of quartzinversion.com. Photo: Brandon Soder

Janet Abrams, co-curator of Quartz Inversion, editor/producer of quartzinversion.com. Photo: Brandon Soder

An alumna of Cranbrook Academy of Art’s MFA program, Janet’s studio practice encompasses sculpture, photography, drawing and installation. Her sculptures—in ceramics, bronze, and other materials—often evoke hybrids of the organic and the industrial; her ongoing series, A Natural History of Technology, explores the formal parallels between natural species and man-made systems.

A renowned critic of architecture and design for several decades, Janet rediscovered clay in her late 40s. She has held several artist residencies, including a three month residency at the European Ceramic Work Centre in the Netherlands in 2013. She won SITE Santa Fe’s SPREAD 5.0 competition for studio artists in 2014.

 

Adil Writer, co-curator of Quartz Inversion.

Adil Writer, co-curator of Quartz Inversion.

An alumnus of Golden Bridge Pottery's ceramics training program, and currently a partner at Mandala Pottery in Auroville, India, Adil originally trained as an architect in Bombay and Houston, before switching to ceramics. A prolific painter and sculptor in clay, he presents his work at ceramics conferences and exhibitions worldwide, and has taken part in several international residencies. Adil has curated several exhibitions, his most recent being Clay: Off The Wall in Bombay which was to be followed by Table Manners 2. This latter exhibition was scheduled to open on the precise day that Bombay went into pandemic lockdown, and has now been postponed.