The 2020 Whitegold International Ceramic Prize will be awarded to excellent projects that enable convivial community interactions through engagement with food and clay. Quartz Award - £10,000. Feldspar Award - £5,000.

This year’s prize is open to artists and artist collectives from across the world including collaborations between artists, cooks, brewers and food producers.

For the first round of submissions, artists, partnerships or collectives are invited to submit two recent projects that demonstrate their work with the inter-relationships of people, clay, soil and food. The Whitegold 2020 jury will select five artists or groups to develop a proposal for a community project in St Austell that brings clay, food and people together in a convivial way.

We are looking for art, craft and design using clay that combines environmental sustainability with creativity and welcome work that relates to cooking, eating, drinking, for creating a festive and sociable environment, ceramics for growing and even works that consider clay as a part of the soil and our life cycle. We are interested in environmentally friendly farming practices, in foraging, in locally and collectively grown produce as well as culinary delights that consider food miles, fairtrade and co-operative production.

Artists, partnerships or collectives selected for the second stage will be invited to propose a new project that involves working with a given community group in St Austell. Projects should have convivial social interactions at their heart and be clear about the ways in which they will bring people together to share skills, food and stories. Projects that have the potential to be sustained and developed by community groups after the festival are especially welcome.

The Whitegold jurors will review these five new proposals and select two finalists who will be allocated a budget of £2,500 each to produce and complete their project to co-incide with the Whitegold Festival on September 19th 2020.

The Whitegold jurors will be invited to the Festival to experience the final outcomes and will work with the local community to make the final decision about who will win the Quartz award and who will get Feldspar.

Timeline

Jan 2020 – Launch. Artists invited to submit previous projects

End Feb - Deadline for first round submissions

End March – 5 artists or collectives selected to develop proposals for community groups

End April – Deadline for submission of project proposals

End May – 2 finalist selected and awarded £2500 each to realise their idea for the Whitegold Festival

September 19th - Festival

Prize

Quartz Award: £10,000

Feldspar Award: £5,000

Scope

Applications are open to ceramic artists and artist collectives anywhere in the world.

For the purposes of the prize an artist collective is understood as a group of artists working together towards a common objective.

Socially engaged practice, also referred to as social practice or socially engaged art, can include any artform which involves people and communities in practice, debate, collaboration or social interaction.

Jurors

Neil Brownsword - International Ceramic Artist and Educator. Winner of the Whitegold Quartz Award, 2019

Neil Brownsword is an artist, researcher and educator who holds Professorial positions in ceramics at Staffordshire University and University of Bergen. Brownsword’s artistic research examines the manufacturing histories of North Staffordshire’s ceramic industry, and the effects globalisation has had upon people, place and traditional skills in recent decades. His reactivation of associated post-industrial spaces and endangered industrial crafts has achieved impact internationally via cross-cultural exchange, and curated trans-disciplinary collaborative projects.

Caroline Cheng - International Ceramic Artist and Director of the Pottery Workshop

Caroline Cheng is an artist and curator, and the director of the Pottery Workshop. She has exhibited her works all over the world and has pieces in the collections of the British Museum, London, Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, Asian Art Museum, San Francisco and Museum of Fine Art, Boston. Cheng has held solo exhibitions in Sotheby’s Hong Kong (2013) and New York (2015) and has received prizes from the Keramik Museum in Westerwald, Germany (2010) and the Clay and Glass Film Festival in Montpellier, France (2010). In 2014 Cheng received the “Outstanding Achievement Award” from the America National Council on Education for the Ceramic Arts (NCECA). Cheng has devoted her life to helping young aspiring craft artists in China setting up a platform for them to work and sell their work, and also is a major promoter of ceramics in China and overseas.

Céline Holman - Curator, Eden Project Ltd 

Céline has worked as part of the Eden Project’s interpretation team for over ten years, working on the curation and commissioning of artists and exhibitions as well as permanent and temporary exhibits. In 2017/18, Céline led the artistic direction of Invisible Worlds, a major capital redevelopment project which included the commissioning of a large scale sculpture by Studio Swine, interactive exhibits, play areas and a new gallery space. Céline is particularly interested in interdisciplinary and socially engaged work.

Ashley Shopland - General Manager Imerys UK, St Austell, Cornwall

Ashley is the Cornish born and bred General Manager of Imerys’ local china clay business, based in St Austell.  The origins of china clay in Cornwall date back almost 275 years to its discovery on Tregonning Hill near Helston. That search was stimulated by the use of china clay in Ceramic products, something that continues strongly to the modern day.  Imerys supplies over 350,000t per year of Cornish china clay into the global Ceramic market, for sanitaryware, tableware and tiles in the main. Ashley’s keen interest arises from this and how artists can further interpret the world of Ceramics for this prize.

Katie Bunnell - Co-Curator Whitegold Project 

Designer, maker and researcher, Katie is a creative practitioner who combines digital and physical processes in the production of ceramic art and design. Katie completed an MA in Ceramics & Glass at the Royal College of Art, London in 1993, where she was a Darwin Scholar, and she was awarded a doctorate in 1998 for her practice based research thesis, The Integration of New Technologies in to Ceramic Designer-Maker Practice. Until 2015 she was Associate Professor of Design at Falmouth University where she created Autonomatic, an award winning design research collective exploring the relationships between craft making and digital technologies.

Jurors will be invited to attend the Whitegold 2020 Festival and experience the projects in action in order to make the final decision about prize winners.

What is Whitegold?

The Whitegold Project is a new initiative set in the heart of Cornwall, in an area famous for China Clay production and renowned for the surrounding sub-tropical gardens. We see a future St Austell, its Bay and the China Clay country as places where amazing art, craft and design of all sizes and shapes, temporary and permanent, of clay and about clay, intrigues, challenges and delights both resident and visitor alike.

Developed over the past few years by the St Austell Bay Economic Forum the Whitegold Project is the vision of some dedicated local people bringing together businesses, councils, artists, gardeners and the people living and working in the area. We believe art in public spaces and greening projects which are socially aware can play a vital role in helping to generate pride in the area, increase a sense of ownership and contribute to a better quality of life.

Whitegold is part of an overall vision for St Austell called Fresh Green Futures which aims to make St Austell into a garden town, drawing on the assets of the established local “paradise” gardens - Eden Project, The Lost Gardens of Heligan, Trewithen, Pine Lodge, Caerhays Castle and many others. We are therefore bringing together artists, makers and designers with communities, gardeners, ecologists and others to undetake projects that will inspire local communities and attract national and international visitors. Recently a grant from the Coastal Communities Fund has allowed us to make a start on this long-term process.

Social Engagement

In all projects Whitegold like to see thought given to creative engagement with communities and publics in and around St Austell in an appropriate form, depending on the proposal, and the skills and abilities of the artist/chef partnership. For example, it could be a way of bringing people into the process of designing/making, or just sharing ideas or skills with people. It might be a form of communication through media; however we wish to avoid tokenistic consultation. This could be something that Whitegold facilitates as part of its wider programme of work with local schools/colleges and with our project partners.