Aspects of materiality and location have driven Eia Radosavljevic’s practice throughout multiple art medium shifts—as a dancer on stage, and making fiber sculptures or felted forms worn as hats. Born in the United States but proud to be an Estonian citizen, she is a decades-long professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, a Fulbrighter, and frequent guest faculty at the Estonian Academy of Arts.

Radosavljevic’s recent work comprises abstract fiber sculpture and writing (primarily poetry) as indicators of experiential genealogy, in exploration of her diasporic heritage. As artistic research, the materials, writing, and act of making reveal concepts within process, and a “conversational” methodology develops in her sculptural work as it moves from the human body to studio surfaces and back again. Tactile handwork is a key factor in Radosavljevic’s art—elements connect, detach, envelop, reveal, tether and free at an impractical pace, often alongside natural materials’ inherent fragrances, and made with joy as defiance and resistance.