Art + Artists

Baylee Schmitt (MFA from Miami University) is currently the printmaking lab manager at University of Cincinnati DAAP. Memory, place, and the indistinguishable difference between childhood fact and fantasy are central to Baylee’s practice as a fiber artist and printmaker.

Baylee has exhibited work with solo exhibitions at Laisun Keane Gallery, River East Gallery, Living Arts and Science Center, and the Fitton Center for Creative Arts. Baylee has also participated in group exhibitions with BravinLee Projects, at TW Fine Art, DesignTO, the Ohio Craft Museum, and Contemporary Craft. Baylee's work has been featured in the Boston Globe Working Artist column, Boston Art Review.

I recreate, or perhaps conjure, rooms from my childhood home through sense and material memory. It’s a meditative – and anxious – practice of understanding the self in relation to family. 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 make up a person; the way rooms make up a house; and the way individuals make up a family. I use yarn to craft an image to interpret the emotional memory of the spaces inhabited by the familial unit. Glimpses of a home well lived-in — tangled chair legs, sweaters on a bedroom floor, the smell of oil leaching from the garage — exist now only as psychological remnants rendered in yarn.