We are going through a period of extraordinary change.

Analogous, perhaps, to quartz inversion in ceramics: the shift that occurs during firing, at 573 degrees Centigrade, when 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 temperature, it cracks.

What kinds of creative shifts are artists experiencing as a consequence of the current pandemic? Will we survive unscathed, making the same kind of work we’ve always made, or will we crack—yielding to unfamiliar (or forgotten) modes of practice?

We invited an international roster of ceramic artists to show us what they have been making during these recent weeks of social isolation—as the Coronavirus encircles the globe with devastating efficiency.

We asked them to reflect on how the Pandemic lockdown, and required social distancing, has affected their artistic practice:

• How is your work changing, and how might it change, a year from now? 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, going back to, or making do with—because your regular studio, kilns, and facilities are 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 to continue with what you have always 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 have 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 are home-schooling during the pandemic. We encouraged them to share their insights into these pedagogical shifts, and explain how they have managed to dovetail these new teaching responsibilities with their own ongoing studio practice (or not).

Rather than following the R-nought number—the epidemiological measure of rate of infection—the Quartz Inversion community will grow according to a Rate of Affection where Ra=1.

Thus, each artist invited in QI Round One was asked to nominate one artist for QI Round Two, opening up the project to a self-organizing curatorial strategy. The artists in this second cohort have each nominated another artist for QI Round Three, to be launched in late spring 2021.