AphroChic Magazine: Issue No. 11

ARTISTS & ARTISANS
Jessica Jean-Baptiste:
The Question is in the Answer
What is art for? Where does it come from and where
does it go? What do we need it for and what does it
actually do? For sculptor Jessica Jean-Baptiste, art is
the answer to an unasked question, the incomplete
solution to a problem she’s never quite fully articulated.
And that’s okay, because in the tension and space
between question and answer, her hands shape plaster
and clay, “making something out of nothing,” and
giving us answers that we didn’t know we’d asked for.
Reflecting on her creative path to see when it was that
she started asking these questions — or when she
stopped — takes her back to her Haiti, where she was
born. “It definitely started there,” she remembers. “I
grew up playing with my sister, with anything that
we found, just going outside and finding leaves to play
with — creating stuff out of nothing. That's where that
sort of creativity stems from in me. And once I came
here, it just kind of continued in small ways.”
Words by Bryan Mason
Photos furnished by Jessica Jean-Baptiste
102 aphrochic