In 2022, emboldened by the supportive arts community of Hamilton, the partners took the plunge and officially launched their studio. Colin quit his corporate gig to focus full time on their business, while Jasmine divides her time between Casa, making art, and developing programs at OCAD University.
In the nearly three years since its inception, Casa Studio has transformed their lives, selling pottery to customers around the world, producing exhibitions and cultural exchanges. Casa Studio invited Format into their newly renovated home studio to talk about pottery, sustainability, and finding new life through creative endeavours.
Check out their Format portfolio: https://www.casastudioceramics.com
Watch the Video:
How Did Your Studio Get Started?
Jasmine: We got started as a studio in 2022. Prior to this, I took ceramics courses just for fun, kind of a side project away from my painting practice. And then I realized that I loved it, I enjoyed it so much, it slowed me down. Painting is very immediate, and pottery really challenges you.
My painting work is pretty sculptural, so it was a natural progression to pottery. Later, Colin and I started the studio together. We started making functional objects, then sculptures, and it’s all been really pretty experimental from the very beginning up till now.
Colin: I worked in retail for twenty-two years. When we founded Casa Studio I took a leap and made the personal decision to step away from my previous career, and now it’s been more than two and a half years. From my end the appeal of ceramics started from a passion for food, plants, and flowers, really pulling from my previous life in retail and doing something creative with those interests.
How Do Your Individual Backgrounds Impact the Work You Make Together?
Jasmine: I have a BFA from OCADU and graduated in 2017. I’m a painter at heart, but my work slowly began becoming more sculptural. My practice is quite tactile. So it was natural for me to just work with my hands in clay. Clay is literally Earth. It’s mud, it felt like a natural progression thinking about sustainability and wanting to be more conscious of the materials that we use in our practice.
Colin: My background is not in art. I do have a history in the Hamilton punk scene. I was a musician a very long time ago. And I’ve only recently tapped back into those creative impulses. I have the greatest art teacher in the world in my fiancé [Jasmine]. I think through our ten years together I’ve become more creative by osmosis and through her critical feedback, I’ve become a better artist.
I honestly think, for me, ceramics has been therapy. Coming out of a twenty year, high intensity career. This practice has brought me back down to earth. Pottery will teach you a lot about yourself, in particular patience. Pottery has allowed me to reconnect with a part of myself, a creative side, that I think was lost for a while. I’m really grateful.
Can You Talk About the Role of Sustainability in Your Work?
Colin: We recycle our clay. So that also comes out in the visual make up of the work as well. In our studio there is a lot of experimentation and it’s important to us that there is little to no waste. All of our scraps we put together and that’s called reclaiming clay. Most potters do this, but since we don’t use any colored glazes the process is easier and it makes it possible for us to reuse basically all of our scraps or failed experiments.
When you recycle clay and then cut into it you’ll just see different layers of different colored pieces of clay. So instead of throwing out that clay or covering it completely, we get to really see the highlights of the various pieces we’ve collected. These recycled pieces carry a lot of the history of our studio in them. I think that clay is one of the greatest art forms for that exact purpose. There’s very little waste. And until you’re happy with your piece it can be a nearly endless cycle of making and reusing until it hits the kiln. I love that what we do is so sustainable.
Jasmine: Also, in terms of sustainability, it just had me thinking in a different way from being an oil painter to now working as a potter. You know, the way that we use our clay, the way that we reclaim our clay. We’ve also developed our process so that we collect and reuse our water. Beyond recycling the raw materials, we also repurpose pieces with imperfections to use in our own home. We’ve also reclaimed fired pieces to turn into mosaics. It’s important to us to create as little waste as possible.
What’s Your Work Life Balance Like? Working from Home, How Do You Separate Things… or Do You?
Jasmine: I love having a home studio. I’m such a homebody. Maybe it’s too convenient. But, we do make an effort to create a work life balance. We actually work right on this [dining] table. I love hand-building here. We have the studio space upstairs but I love working in this space as well.
Colin: I used to throw in a shared, community studio but over the winter break, we moved everything into our home and we now have a dedicated studio space in our house. It makes a lot of things easier and it’s nice to have the throwing and hand-building happening all in one place.
Jasmine: One of the things that makes us Casa Studio is the fact that we were both dedicated and we were both very tactile and we like working. It’s great that we get to spend all of this time together but we also try to make space for us as a couple outside of work- to go on dates, to go outside together- it’s a cadence that we’re still working on.
Tell Us About Your Artistic Community in Hamilton
Jasmine: We moved to Hamilton in 2020. And our pottery studio started in 2022. When we moved, I took classes at Hamilton Craft Studio. That was our way of learning about the pottery and arts community of Hamilton. The pottery community were so welcoming and generous with their time to show you how to do something, and also to show you what to avoid as we started our own studio.
Colin: It’s just been incredible for me to immerse myself within this community. And like Jasmine said, I’m originally from Hamilton, but, coming back and engaging with creatives here, Hamilton has been so welcoming to us.
We’ve also been learning so much about Hamilton’s deep pottery roots. There’s a lot of natural clay here so there’s a long history of pottery in this town. Hamilton’s original pottery community comes from the Dundas Valley School of the Arts. We’ll actually both be going there soon to do raku firing together, which will be Jasmine’s first experience with Raku. Raku is a Japanese firing technique where you first low fire bisque and then glaze with special Raku glazes, which are fired outside. With this process you can use combustible materials like fire, wood, paper and feathers to create unique glaze effects.
Jasmine: I’m so excited for Raku. In my heart I am a potter. Ceramics started off as a hobby, but now it’s taken over my life.
Can You Describe What Hamilton Art Crawl Is?
Jasmine: Hamilton Art Crawl happens the second Friday of every month. It begins in April and ends early fall. And it’s free for artists to join and to bring any type of work they make, whether it is textiles, ceramic, anything you can think of, really. We gather on James Street North and each crawl usually lasts a few hours.
Colin: It’s really great. You get to meet new artists and hang out with all sorts of people. It’s a great chance to connect or reconnect with people in the community. Participating in the crawl is how we’ve gotten into some stores and made friends with the arts community here. We’ve also done some collaborations with other artists and businesses we’ve met through the crawl.
What Role Does Your Portfolio Play in Your Career in Business?
Jasmine: Having a Format portfolio is a space for us to hold all our photos. Our Format site reminds us what we did two years ago and how things have progressed. When you’re producing so much work and selling it and having it go out into the world it’s nice to be able to have that record of your practice with all of your images in one place. Also, in terms of sharing it with clients, it’s easy. I love being able to say “Here’s the link. You can see what we do.”
Colin: It’s so nice to be able to personalize things. So it is great just to have an online portfolio that we can update easily. As a small studio we have a to-do list that is a mile long. I very much agree with Jasmine in the sense that we never look backwards, we’re always looking forward.
Our Format site gives us a great opportunity to look back and see some of the works we made previously as we focus on the future.
Jasmine: We’ve also used the Format store to sell merch. We worked with a Toronto screen printing company My Moving Parts and decided to put the shirts on Format. Our site also acts as a lead to our Etsy shop where we sell items worldwide.
Tell Us About Any Upcoming Projects That Are On the Horizon
Colin:We have a few upcoming projects we’re excited about. We have a collaboration coming with the Hamilton based, floral company called Sticks and Stones Floral Design. We’re extremely excited to collaborate with another local business.
We’re also working right now to refresh inventory for stores within Hamilton we sell pottery through.
Jasmine: I’m hosting a workshop in the new year under my role at OCAD University. The workshop will focus on experimentation with mineral stone pigments and clay, in collaboration as an intercultural mail exchange with a professor in Japan. Professor Emeritus Kouan Hashimoto of Joshibi University of Art & Design in Sagamihara, Japan.
His research is in the use of advanced grinding techniques to create natural submicron pigments from stones. We are collecting local stones and sending them to him and then he will be making these into pigments and sending them back for us to bind to clay and fire them. It’s a completely experimental process. I’m excited to see how it goes because it is not only a cultural exchange, but it’s an actual physical and material exchange, which is super exciting. The workshop is being held in the spring with OCAD U students, so I’m excited to see who applies and then also what stones they submit.
Please Tell Us About Your Solo Show Last Year
Colin: We were approached by Regional Archive, which is run by Amy Peebles. We met her when we went to see Shea Chang’s show, at Monday Press (such an awesome show!) And Amy offered us the opportunity to work on a new body of work for two seasons. The exhibition gave us the opportunity to really experiment. That was the first time we were able to tint our clay, experiment with the shapes, and create more works on the wall instead of just, straight, functional pieces.
Jasmine: So much happened last year. The show was called What I Want to Be When I Grow Up, and I felt like it was a great opportunity for us to just really explore. Clay is new to me, clay is new to Collin, so it was really nice to just experiment. Our community came out for us for the opening night, and it was so enriching and humbling to see all our friends, as well as new faces, come out to support us. As a compliment to the show we were able to host a series of free workshops, both for children and adults, allowing them to explore clay for the first time. The reception was absolutely incredible. It was a really, really fun time, for both us and the participants. We can’t wait to do it again.
Colin: I lived in retail for 22 years, where I worked 100 hours a week, and it was my entire existence for almost my entire life. It’s been amazing, in my adult life, to prove to myself that I can be something else and that I was a little bit more dynamic than I’d given myself credit for. The solo show was very reaffirming for me to prove that you can be many things.
Connect With Your Community
Level up your brand with a professional portfolio website.
