Worth over £20,000, the prize is part of the Whitegold Project, an initiative set in St Austell in the heart of Cornwall. The Project aims to create art, craft and design inspired by the area’s industrial and post-industrial landscape and its global china clay connections.
Conviviality is the theme of the second Whitegold Prize, to be awarded to ceramics projects which enable convivial community interactions through their engagement with food and clay.
Applications were invited which combine environmental sustainability with creativity. Themes include cooking, eating, drinking, creating a festive and sociable environment, ceramics for growing, works that consider clay as a part of the soil and life cycle, and environmentally friendly food production.
Selected from a strong field of international entries, the shortlisted projects are:
Clayground Collective
Creative practitioners Duncan Hooson, Claire West and Julia Rowntree collaborate across artforms to engage the public, educators and researchers through clay.
Francesca Anfossi
Francesca Anfossi’s interdisciplinary practice takes the tradition of crafts as a starting point to make and collaborate, using ceramic as a core material.
Portland Inn Project
The Portland Inn Project is a creative arts project for a community in Stoke-on-Trent that aims to achieve community cohesion, economic, social and cultural development.
Adam Sutherland, Grizedale Arts
Grizedale Arts is a local resource and an international arts organisation. Its activity is drawn from existing, available resources, from raw materials to cultural heritage.
Whitegold Project Co-Curator Katie Bunnell said:
“The Prize recognises outstanding ceramic practices that connect people, culture and place. The aim of this year’s prize is to inspire projects which use ceramics to encourage conviviality and connections within local communities. We are hoping that shortlisted artists will be able to start working remotely with local communities through digital technologies. We just don’t know how things will play out in the longer term, but we are hopeful at this stage that ‘hands on’ community projects will go ahead later in the summer. While the future is uncertain we feel it is important to recognise the hard work and extraordinary creativity from all our applicants. In particular, we wanted to share the good news about the shortlisted artists, and to give the people of St Austell something to look forward to when the time is right.”
The shortlisted artists and groups are each invited to develop a proposal for a new community project for St Austell that uses clay and food to bring people together. The Whitegold jurors will review these four new proposals and select two finalists who will be allocated a budget of £2,500 each to produce and complete their project.
The original aim was for these projects to coincide with the Whitegold Festival in September 2020. The Whitegold jurors would then experience the final outcomes and work with the local community to make the final decision about which of the finalists would win the Quartz award of £10,000 and who will be awarded the £5000 Feldspar Award.
The 2020 jurors are:
Neil Brownsword – International Ceramic Artist Educator. Winner of the Whitegold Quartz Award, 2019
Caroline Cheng – International Ceramic Artist and Director of the Pottery Workshop
Céline Holman – Curator, Eden Project Ltd
Ashley Shopland – General Manager Imerys UK, St Austell, Cornwall
Ben Quinn – Canteen Cornwall and Woodfired Canteen
Katie Bunnell – Co-Curator, Whitegold Project
Gillian Taylor PR 
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