Duet

Two sculptural ceramicists share a four-day residency in an old brick school building, and together create eleven extraordinary heads. This short documentary shows the intimacy of a communal creative project, it explores the creative process, especially regarding clay work, and it explores the role of place in creativity, as an old building in a post-industrial town which was scheduled for demolition finds new life as an arts center. The ceramicists are Doug Jeck, long a prominent worker in the field. The other is Christine Golden, who once did a paper on Doug Jeck when she was in graduate school. Christine won the inaugural $20,000 Zanesville Prize in Contemporary Ceramics, and when Doug Jeck saw her prize-winning piece the next year, when he was a judge in the next competition, he knew this was someone he wanted to work with. The film documents, day by day, how the two artists craft a startling and stunning array of psyches, gazes, and visages. Zanesville, once a rich and bustling town because of its industrial clay production, now one more of the many sagging post-industrial cities in the Midwest, is in the process of reinventing itself with an arts and culture identity. The Zanesville Prize is a key element of this movement, as is the Pioneer School Zanesville (PSZ) project. Duet captures the kind of creativity Zanesville is just beginning to attract.