Born in Prague, Czechoslovakia in 1958, Yvette Kaiser Smith now lives and works in Chicago. A full-time artist since receiving her 1994 MFA from the University of Chicago, Yvette has exhibited extensively at regional museums, art centers, and university galleries throughout the United States and abroad, working with interior designers, art consulting firms, galleries, and individual clients to create site-specific, private and public commissions since 2005.

Yvette creates her own fiberglass cloth by crocheting continuous strands of fiberglass into flat geometric shapes. These are formed and hardened with the application of hard-finish polyester resin and the use of gravity. A visual articulation of mathematics is used to generate random visual patterns through form and color distribution by utilizing the grid, Pascal’s Triangle, and sequences from numbers pi or e.

Her current practice of creating math generated work and crocheting fiberglass began twenty years ago when she started making sculpture that dealt with abstracting narratives of identity. Within this context, an exploration of fiberglass and resin led her to crocheting fiberglass roving. Years later, the same pursuit led her to start mapping patterns from math sequences. In terms of identity, math is the underlying principle in all of life. And, all cultures seem to have their own lace tradition, one tiny point of intersection that can connects us all.