Yasmin Spiro’s artworks explore identity and homeland.

For Jamaica native Yasmin Spiro, creating art is like writing an autobiography. Whether working with felt, ceramic, plaster, burlap or rope, the Chicago-based artist endows her pieces with allusions to both her and her home country’s history—personal and cultural, economic and political.

Spiro's ridged and glazed modular ceramic pieces are “meant to evoke both the body and architecture.”

Spiro's ridged and glazed modular ceramic pieces are “meant to evoke both the body and architecture.”

She uses molds to create her ridged ceramic pieces.

She uses molds to create her ridged ceramic pieces.

Her Groundation installation, which consisted of woven-rope-and-wood panels, looked at craft traditions.

Her Groundation installation, which consisted of woven-rope-and-wood panels, looked at craft traditions.

She is currently sketching and researching for her upcoming “Cornerstone” exhibition at the Hyde Park Art Center.

She is currently sketching and researching for her upcoming “Cornerstone” exhibition at the Hyde Park Art Center.

The artist grew up in Jamaica, dividing her time between Kingston and a farm on the country’s northern coast. When she left to attend college (she has a degree from Pratt Institute) she carried memories of her homeland’s topography, the lingering effects of colonialism and the craft traditions passed down across generations. Groundation—Spiro’s recent installation at the Arts Club of Chicago—explored these topics. A 40-foot-weaving of polypropylene rope upon the institution’s entry fence, Groundation (a riff on the Rastafarian word “grounation,” meaning “gathering”) paid homage to an old family friend and a descendant of slaves, Sylvester, who transformed his home into an elaborate woven-wicker environment. “His forebears handed down their cultural history as weavers—just as my Yugoslavian grandmother taught me to sew and do macramé,” Spiro says. 

The weaving also honored Spiro’s seafaring grandfather (from whom she learned the sailing skill of tying knots) with embedded bits of glazed porcelain shaped like fishing lures. Spiro crafted those pieces at Kohler’s prestigious Arts/Industry residency program in Sheboygan, Wisconsin. There she also made molds and cast a multitude of ridged and glazed modular ceramic pieces for a series “meant to evoke both the body and architecture,” the artist explains. “I’m thinking about bodies in relation to land and how that ties to colonialism.” For other works in this series, Spiro uses swaths of felt that she folds and machine-stitches then wraps around porcelain structures mounted on a wall. The stiff ridges echo Jamaica’s urban architecture—from the ubiquitous rippled zinc roofs and siding to the patterned breeze-blocks used throughout the Caribbean.

Currently artist-in-residence at the Hyde Park Art Center, Spiro’s solo show, “Cornerstone,” opening May 2025, will continue her exploration of shared and sacred spaces. “I’m interested in the ways in which we anchor our identities to ideas of homeland and nationalism,” Spiro says. “I want to ponder isolation, togetherness and the mystery of what it means to be home.” 

 PHOTOS: TONY FAVARULA