Untitled Document

Domains of Intimacy

by Yvette Smith

These crocheted and cast fiberglass bodies marry formal artistic language and personal experience. They are born of an assemblage of psychological issues, body/nature referents and the pure exploration of their sculptural flesh.

As abstractions of personal situations, they compress a complex psychological state and social circumstance into a single image. The forms are reactions to thoughts of identity -- circumstance of identity, shape of identity, identity within social structure and social structures as they forge identity. The work examines social patterns through the weave of fiberglass and other materials.

The challenge of my work resides in the combination of two main ideas: the development of the crocheting process into a contemporary artistic language and the conceptual abstraction of narrative. Each form embodies modernist ideas of purity of form and truth to material, interweaving a postmodernist loyalty to a strong conceptual agenda.

-- Yvette Kaiser Smith, August 1999