Power In Simplicity
Power In Simplicity
Power In Simplicity
Kristina Batiste created This is not a cup during the summer of 2020. These ceramic protest signs provide conversational openings in the private sphere. Black stoneware, underglaze, cardboard, 2.75 x 3 in. Photo by Ben McDonald.
Ceramic artist Kristina Batiste. Photo courtesy of artist.
Tacoma, Washington–based ceramic artist Kristina Batiste’s work lives in a space where functional craft and fine art intersect. In her studio, divining abstract sculptures for white cube galleries takes on the same weight as caring for the gentle slopes of her plates, cups, and bowls that find their way to our homes and restaurants. Employing both wheel-thrown and hand-built techniques, Batiste works in what she calls the “humble” material of clay to reshape how we come together, proposing new and perhaps more just modes of communing with one another.
“Clay has memory and is strong enough to hold powerful ideas, just like a line or a spare composition, or a shape, or a color,” Batiste says. “If you get it right, you can hold the universe in a line.”
Much of the power of Batiste’s work lies in her minimalist aesthetic. Her elegant serving-ware pieces are marked with various irregular lines mimicking hand drawing, as well as raised lines and dotted indentures, all providing ornamental and tactile details that quietly catch and focus our attention. She conjures a story or delivers a message via these markings, and in so doing, she slows down our meaning-making processes and focuses our attention on subtle transformations in material. She opens our minds to new and different sets of questions.
This is palpable in a set of wearable pendants and functional cups featuring three yellow stripes—echoing the stripes of the Black Lives Matter logo—that Batiste created the summer of 2020, after George Floyd was killed. At the time, far too many people were unaware of, or ignoring, the many forms of violence that characterize life in the US, and which disproportionately affect Black, brown, Indigenous, immigrant, and trans populations. And while many took to the streets that summer, the question remained of how to draw people into unfamiliar or uncomfortable conversations.
“A lot of people in the world, they’re not going to protests, they’re not going to go to a demonstration,” says Batiste. “But you might have them over for a cup of coffee or a glass of wine. And you can use this protest sign as an invitation to have a conversation that you probably would not have.” With her protest ware, Batiste works to render dense, painful histories into small markings that we can touch and see in ways that might invite unexpected and productive interpersonal relations.
Batiste came to ceramics relatively late in life. Having worked as a writer and editor, and in graphic design and higher education, she had no formal art training when, in her 30s, she dove into the pottery communities of the Tacoma Community College and the local supply store Clay Art Center. “Instead of ‘30 Under 30’ it should be ‘50 Over 50,’” she laughs. “After you already know how hard the world is—you’ve got a mortgage, and you’ve got stuff to do, and you can’t take the kinds of risks you could take when you were 20—and you still pick up a paintbrush for the first time? And you still try this thing out for the first time? I’m gonna celebrate that.” Batiste is well on her way to making it onto such a list. In a span of a few short years, she has built a robust exhibition schedule and in 2023 was awarded The Current, the Tacoma Art Museum’s annual unrestricted award celebrating Black artists.
According to Batiste, the stoneware pendants of This is not a necklace send “that signal of safety to the Black and brown people you encounter.” Photo by Kristina Batiste.
Batiste's sour, hot, bitter, and sweet, 2022—made of porcelain, cedar, and “Black joy”—is designed for use in a “tasting of the elements” wedding ceremony. Photo by Ben McDonald.
Batiste views the through line of her various jobs and roles as distilling complex ideas into accessible, memorable forms. She did that with sour, hot, bitter, and sweet (2022), a set of 4-inch porcelain bowls installed on a flat cedar plinth that follows a Yoruba tradition: each bowl holds a different element that a newly married couple will experience in their lifetime together. The bowls are neither precious art nor ceremonial objects. “I wanted to make the piece that was used in the ceremony but then these little dishes that you can use forever,” Batiste explains. “You don’t keep them on their ceremonial plinth—you can use them for anything and remember that day.”
Her interest in multifunctional objects that hold multiple histories within them carries over to hope/memory (2023), a pair of stoneware bowls that feature Batiste’s characteristic small markings and which she created with nine other people. As each person laid coils for the bowls, they invested their hopes and memories into the clay. The shiny glazed interiors of the bowls suggest both silky softness and shellacked protection that may be characteristic of the potters’ inner lives, whereas the uneven surfaces of the bowls’ textured exteriors underscore the many hits one takes while living a life.
Complementing the production of her functional ware, Batiste is moving toward more sculptural works. Earlier this year, she completed an abstract portrait of civil rights activist Fannie Lou Hamer called five feet four inches forward (2024), a composition of 64 slabs of clay that speaks to the massive amount of work done by Hamer and of the sharecroppers she organized throughout the South. Batiste practices a rich color theory in managing the different post-kiln hues of the “plum black” clay she used—clay that points both to the earth Hamer toiled upon and the richness of her skin. The sculpture’s title comes from Hamer herself: “But if I fall, I’ll fall five feet four inches forward in the fight for freedom.”
Five feet four inches forward forges a material connection between Batiste’s and Hamer’s laboring bodies while underscoring the pervasive risk that shapes Black life and clay processes. The vulnerability required to work in clay is further underscored by tesselatum (2019), a hanging piece that is made of four lines of warped clay tablets strung together with leather. It is unclear whether the small cracks in each tablet are environmental or technical mistakes, but they are held together by the artist’s intervention: copper bindings. The seemingly fragile pieces are pulled ever downward by gravity yet held up by one another.
Batiste’s rising star is due in part to her refreshing take on minimalism, given how Western art worlds tacitly expect Black artists to work within figurative and text-based traditions in order to directly and literally reflect on sociopolitical issues. Minimalism has historically been perceived as the absence of politics, if not flight from it. The great minimalist artists often worked to harness “pure” qualities of experience, aesthetics, and materials. For Batiste, meaning can never be contained within the art object nor within the bounds of experiencing it.
The coil-built bowls of hope/memory, 2023, were created with collaborators, 12 x 18 in. Photos by Ben McDonald.
General Order Volume II: the sharing bowl, 2023, is part of a 10-year distributed sculpture project celebrating Juneteenth, porcelain, iron wash, 5 x 16 in. diameter.
The markings on General Order Volume II: the sharing bowl commemorate the date the Emancipation Proclamation reached Galveston, Texas.
The simplicity of her work invites reflection and affords profoundly collaborative moments of co-thinking that are only intensified by her medium of choice. “When there is a lot going on, it’s really hard to come out with a clear idea or a clear purpose,” she says. “And I think that taking away extraneous stuff to reveal what is essential—like, this is what is absolutely essential and needed for this—I find it very calming.”
Her minimalist approach can also be productively high stakes, however. “When there’s a single line or shape or absence, every decision around that element matters more—the weight and shape and color and texture and orientation,” Batiste says. “Of course, all those things matter in a maximalist or realist composition, but because that single line doesn’t have anything else to share the load with, it has to carry everything. I like how deliberate that makes the work. There’s no hiding.”
Batiste assembles tesselatum. Photo by Ben McDonald.
Batiste’s tesselatum, 2019, clay, hemlock, leather, copper, gravity. Photo by Ben McDonald.
