Midwest textile artist Baylee Schmitt examines themes of identity, girlhood, and nostalgia by crocheting objects and memories from her childhood home. She is a part of the current movement of establishing stereotypically feminine American craft and textile traditions as fine art.

Crochet is a series of units: stitches that make up rows, rows that make up shapes, and shapes that make up both image and object. It echoes the way memories, relationships, and experiences seem to make up a person; the way rooms make up a house; and the way individuals make up a family. Baylee Schmitt uses yarn to build shapes stitch by stitch, crafting an image to interpret the emotional memory of the space that she and her twin sister inhabited as a unit. A relationship fraught with petty bickering, clenched teeth, and arm pinching is also one of inherent, sometimes tense, allyship. Baylee Schmitt’s girlish subject matter and crochet medium reflect conventional textile practices, however, she offsets this standard by employing unique, interactive installation tactics, and painterly technical skills (which are made obvious through skillful treatment of figuration). Schmitt grew up in Ohio, which is one of the places responsible for the popularization of “yarn bombing”; a feminist movement that reclaims the traditional, generational feminine arts of knitting and/or crocheting to partake in the traditionally masculine and male-dominated graffiti scene. Schmitt similarly rejects the limits imposed upon feminine crafts, and perpetuates the seriousness of female craft without sacrificing symbols of girlhood and innocence.