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 artmaking, 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 artmaking?
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?