In Conversation with: Jasmine Baetz, Lincoln Visiting Professor in Ceramics at Scripps College
I recently had the chance to sit down with Jasmine Baetz, Lincoln Visiting Professor in Ceramics at Scripps College. In the fall, Jasmine was awarded Hive faculty course grants for her courses Clay and Fiber and Materials and Extraction. Jasmine’s approach to teaching and artmaking has been inspiring our team here at the Hive, and it’s been a joy to learn from her work and practice.
Check out my conversation with Jasmine, where we had a chance to explore her early introductions to art-making, how theoretical texts can inform handmade works, and the importance of critique and inquiry in both her personal work, and her teaching.
Olivia: I was reading about your work and saw that you’ve been working with clay, specifically, since you were a child. How did you get introduced to clay and other forms of art-making?
Jasmine: I grew up in Dundas, Ontario, and I was really lucky as a kid that there was a wonderful art school in my hometown. I took after school children’s classes there and had some really wonderful teachers in ceramics, and lots of other classes where I was encouraged to express myself and trust myself. We were even encouraged to find meaning in process.
I think a lot of the building blocks of what I learned about doing art and teaching art were set when I was really young. That was really useful for me when I was going through school and other academic spaces where trusting myself and following my interests, frameworks, and critiques was not always validated. As I was navigating that, I could hang on to some of my early ways of knowing and doing, which was awesome.
Olivia: Do you remember what sort of projects you would work on? Or how the teachers would help you to find meaning in the work?
Jasmine: We had a substitute teacher one time, in a ceramics class … she was a very well known artist. She made American Raku animals, mostly polar bears, and as a kid, my parents had one of them. I knew it was expensive, and that there was some clay practice that was sort of higher end or precious. Anyways, she came in, and she was like, “Hey, here’s how you make this slab polar bear!” and she made one and was like, “Everyone make one!”
She didn’t hold back her technique, she made it so approachable and knowable. And I remember it because, even as a kid, I understood that her practice was something that was important, but she didn’t gatekeep it at all. She was just like, “Here’s how you do it! And look, yours are all as good as mine.” That’s something that I’ve thought about often when I’ve had classes where technique becomes this tense thing that is gatekept or used to differentiate people or grade people.
Olivia: That’s such a wonderful, visceral example. I love how that then translated to your own teaching practice and things that you still carry with you.
You have experience working with a variety of mediums; what led clay to continue to be the medium that you love and work with a lot?
Jasmine: I think it’s mostly related to loving the feeling and the process of it. I don’t have a particularly straightforward relationship with ceramics. I often work in ways that are characterized as “not ceramics.” I had this experience last year where I was selected as an emerging artist for my national ceramics organization, it’s called NCECA. When I told them what work I was going to show for the emerging artists exhibition, they were like, “that’s not ceramics.” (laughs)
This theme of belonging versus not belonging, is one that I feel in many areas, but certainly in terms of how I approach ceramics. The expansiveness of what I think can be included in a ceramics curriculum or thought of as ceramics practice can sometimes be a point of tension, but I’m trying to put myself in places where it’s more of a point of celebration and communal inquiry into something different and forward-looking.
Olivia: You often incorporate queer, feminist, and anti-racist theory into your ceramics classes. It’s cool to see that combination of theory and tangible making, and I’m curious: how do those two coexist in a given class for you?
Jasmine: When I was in grad school, I really wanted to take an art practices class about feminist methods, but was told, “We don’t have that here.” When I got to Scripps and saw that there are some art and feminist practice classes here, I thought, sweet! I can teach in this way and it won’t be something that I have to defend or fight.
In my first semester of grad school, I took a feminist methodology class. I was always checking in with the teacher, because I was very distressed about not being able to articulate what feminist methods of art were. Like, is it a reactive position? Is it a constant critique of the sort of masculinist trash of the discipline? My constant questions were probably very annoying, but it was really useful to think about all of those things, and work to articulate answers. I was trying to find the language to defend my approach to art, because in some ways it did feel oppositional. In some of the art practices and spaces I was in, foregrounding identity and subjectivity was not a welcome thing.
One theorist who, whenever I read her, gives me language and direction for so much of my own ceramic work is Sara Ahmed. I’m teaching my class, Making a Feminist Life, again this coming spring, and in it, we read a Sara Ahmed book together. We use the different sections of that book to motivate different projects, where we’re making together, but we’re also reading each other’s work through the text. In job interviews when they were like, “What’s your perfect class?” I’d be like, “Oh, we just read Sara Ahmed and make stuff out of clay together.” And then I did it, and it was better than what I imagined it would be, because of the students! The students literally started citing page numbers when they were talking about each other’s work. (laughs) And I was like, “Oh my god, I didn’t know you could do that!”
Olivia: What is an example of a project from one of your classes this fall?
Jasmine: For the second project in the Materials and Extraction class which I co-taught with Jih-Fei Cheng, we did a site-specific installation project. We started by learning about the history of the campus, which is always illuminating. It’s shocking to me how you can get through a program without really knowing where you are — we can exist in such an ahistorical way. And that’s by design, right? That’s part of how these spaces are imagined: as safe little bubbles. But in reality, college campuses, in most cases, have pretty devastating histories of exclusion, violence, and suppression of student voices.
For this project, we wanted students to be in direct conversation with Jorge, Ramon, and Manuel who do our groundskeeping work at Scripps. We asked them to learn about the ways that the groundskeeping staff care for, interpret, and sculpt the campus through their work. Then, they would identify a place on campus to make a sculptural intervention that either visualizes or interprets one of the actions our groundskeeping staff carry out in their work. It was a pretty loose prompt, and what the students created would depend a lot on what they heard in their conversation, and what kind of topics they were interested in.
The groundskeepers shared about the intentionality of where and when they work around campus as to not be disruptive, and in our continuing discussions many of my students talked about how this careful coordination functioned to ensure that few students noticed their daily labor. They were struck by how groundskeepers are scheduled to do things at particular times of the day, like when classes are in session. We talked about how laborers might be doing work that to some is invisible. One artist whose work very directly addresses this topic is Jay Lynn Gomez, whose cardboard cutout portraits make visible the “invisible” laborers who create and maintain the landscaping of Southern California.
There were a couple of really interesting installations students created in the rose garden at Scripps. Students were struck by the amount of skill and knowledge required to tend to the gardens. And maybe they were struck by it only because we are often sold a pervasive idea that this kind of work is non-skilled, when it is highly skilled work. For instance, the cutting and the pruning is so essential to the life of the roses, and if it’s not done properly, or if it’s done with a blade that has touched another kind of flower or plant, that can kill them. So the work requires this huge understanding of ecosystems and built environments. One student created a piece mostly made in reference to this skill and knowledge base (below). It was a sculptural abstraction of a rosebush that had died, juxtaposing it against what was in the garden. Another student created a piece with three roses sitting at the bottom of a pillar that is damaged and deteriorating, invoking the structural reliance on underpaid labor at the colleges, and challenging Scripps’ image of strength, uniformity, and stability (above).
Olivia: What’s next for you in your time here at Scripps?
Jasmine: I’m curating a show at the Ruth Chandler Williamson galleries that will open in January 2024. The title right now is “The Idea of Feeling Brown,” and it’s motivated by José Esteban Muñoz and other artists who, in different ways, make work in this realm of “feeling brown,” as he theorizes it, as a mode of difference within a majoritarian white space. There are going to be twelve artists in that show, and I’m thinking about ways that I can include students, and possibly community organizations, in the creation of that show.
To learn more about Jasmine and her work, check out her website here.
Olivia Hewitt is a post-baccalaureate associate at the Rick and Susan Sontag Center for Collaborative Creativity (or, The Hive), where she helps run an audio recording studio, and shares stories about the many creative people that pass through the Hive’s doors. Connect with her here!
