Profile - Sheila Hicks
Weavings, tapestries, sculptures and monumental textile installation artist, Sheila Hicks
Words by David Trigg
KNOWN FOR HER colourful weavings, tapestries, sculptures and monumental textile installations, Sheila Hicks has filled art galleries and public spaces around the world with voluminous forms and enticing textures. Taught to sew, knit and crochet by her mother and grandmothers, the Paris-based American artist remembers toying with threads on the steps of her Detroit home as she waited for her father to return from work. From these humble beginnings in the 1940s, she has established herself as one of the world’s foremost fibre artists, whose intricate works demonstrate the extraordinary versatility and expressive potential of textiles. This spring, her rich and complex work is the focus of a major retrospective at the Hepworth Wakefield in Yorkshire, which promises a wealth of exhilarating visual and sensual experiences while providing insights into the development of her innovative practice.
For more than six decades, Hicks has looked to vernacular textile traditions from across the globe to inform her work. ‘Textile is a universal language’, she has said. ‘In all of the cultures of the world, textile is a crucial and essential component.’ Well before transnational engagement became the norm, Hicks was embracing opportunities to live and work abroad. Her extensive travels have seen her immersed in local communities from Venezuela, Chile and Uruguay to Mexico, Brazil, India, Japan and Saudi Arabia, learning first-hand both modern and ancient weaving techniques. This rich education, combined with extensive periods of experimentation, has fed the development of a unique artistic language.
Born in Hastings, Nebraska in 1934, Hicks lived a nomadic lifestyle. ‘I always say I grew up in a car’, she once commented, referring to the fact that the Great Depression forced her father to seek work wherever he could find it. Her migratory childhood took her from Oklahoma to Tennessee, Kentucky, Florida, and Louisiana before a secure government job led her family to Michigan during the Second World War. For Hicks, it was one big adventure. If her father instilled in her a taste for travel, it was her mother who nurtured her creativity by taking her to the Detroit Institute of Arts for art lessons. Inspired by those early classes, Hicks began studying painting and printmaking at Syracuse University in 1952. Two years later she transferred to Yale where her interest in weaving was piqued by George Kubler, a specialist in pre-Columbian art. ‘Kubler was flashing slides of incredible weavings up on the screen and what caught my interest was their colour, design and shape’, Hicks recalled and she soon began teaching herself how to weave on a simple on a backstrap loom.
Sheila Hicks Cordes Sauvages/Hidden Blue, 2014. The Deighton Collection. Courtesy of Alison Jacques Gallery, London
Another influential figure at Yale was the former Bauhaus master Josef Albers who awakened Hicks to the world of colour. His lessons in colour and visual phenomena have stuck with her ever since. In 1957, a Fulbright scholarship took her to Chile for a year, where she made weavings inspired by ancient Andean textiles. Returning to the US via Uruguay and Bolivia she witnessed an abundance of textile production. ‘Bolivian markets were full of knitting and weaving, and I saw weavers working on backstrap looms all along in the countryside’, she recalled. Hicks’s South American trip opened her eyes to the potential of textiles and after graduating from Yale she moved to Mexico where she wove with hand spun wool and used upturned tables as improvised looms. She took her abstract weavings to Antonio Souza, who gave her a solo exhibition in Mexico City in 1961 and she even managed to sell some pieces to the Museum of Modern Art in New York. When she met Alfred J. Barr, he said ‘can you make these larger?’ She could, and her work has continued growing ever since.
In 1962 Hicks left Mexico for France. To finance the move, she approached Knoll in New York. As she was showing the executives her upholstery designs, Florence Knoll walked into the meeting and immediately said: ‘I don’t want her to leave this office without you giving her a contract to work with us’. Hicks became a consultant, sending Knoll a steady stream of ideas and designs. ‘That was the first, solid financial backing that I could count on’, she recalled. Her first pieces for Knoll were created in 1965, most notably her Bordados cushions for Eero Saarinen’s Tulip Chair. From her new Paris base, Hicks worked on many large-scale commissions, including vast linen and silk bas-relief tapestries for Saarinen’s TWA terminal at John F. Kennedy International airport in 1962, and for the Ford Foundation building in New York in 1967 – a work that she spent a year re-creating in 2013–14 after the original had been damaged.
Sheila Hicks, Grand Boules, 2009 Tate. Presented by Melvin Bredrick, New York with the support of Alison Jacques, London
Between 1969 and 1977 she developed a series of petit point textile panels for the interiors of Air France Boeing 747 aircraft; designed to fit the curved contours of the first class cabins, each was hand-embroidered using wild Chinese silk and were as compelling to look at as they were to touch. In 1972 she created La Memoire for the IBM headquarters in Paris – a huge red, yellow and orange wall hanging woven from linen, silk, wool and synthetic fibres. With so many labour intensive projects, Hicks began to employ and train a team of assistants, some of whom remain with her today.
By the 1970s, she was an established figure in the burgeoning ‘fibre art’ movement, alongside artists such as Lenore Tawney and Claire Zeisler, and was exhibiting extensively in Europe and America. An important barometer of contemporary textile art at this time was the International Lausanne Tapestry Biennial. For the 1977 edition, she memorably borrowed five tons of hospital laundry, which she piled up and shaped to resemble a cascading avalanche. For some, it was too radical, though for Hicks it represented a turning point in her thinking about the spatial potential of textiles as well as her medium’s power to evoke emotion. ‘I saw how people could be affected by the silent presence – the physical presence – of familiar textile garments used in a conceptual way’, she said.
Sheila Hicks, Saffron Sentinel, 2017. © Sheila Hicks. Courtesy of Alison Jacques Gallery, London. Image Credit: NOAM PREISMAN
Today, Hicks is celebrated for her large scale works, such as the The Questioning Column (2016), an enormous 7m high cascade of multicoloured strands made for the 2016 Sydney Biennale. Even more ambitious was Escalade Beyond Chromatic Lands (2017), which saw a mountain of brilliantly coloured synthetic fibre bales piled up to the ceiling of the Arsenale at the 2017 Venice Biennale. On the opposite end of the spectrum are her small A4-sized weavings, which she calls ‘minimes’. Created almost daily like diary entries, these intimate works are woven on a small portable loom and often incorporate found materials, such as wood, metal or, as in Bardos Tronquoy (1966), razor clam shells found on a far flung beach. A striped feather appears in the gloriously chaotic As If I Did Not Know (2015-16), which includes fine golden threads made from Japanese rice paper.
Sometimes Hicks embeds objects into her soft sculptures, including her tightly bound spheroid forms called ‘boules’, which are commonly found clustered on gallery floors. As with all her works, they reward close observation. Indeed, she often weaves ‘mistakes’ into her pieces to see if anyone will notice. ‘Usually only children do, because they’re not jaded’, she has said. ‘They look at the work, and see it differently.’ Hicks has never lost this childlike way of seeing the world; it feeds all of her making, but especially her site specific installations. She often invents pieces for particular spaces. At the Hepworth Wakefield, Hicks is showing a major new installation responding to the David Chipperfield-designed gallery spaces. ‘I’m excited about it because of the architecture of the galleries, with interesting spaces and unusual light. There are windows in the roof; it’s not a closed cell’, she commented. In fact, around half of the show has been conceived with Chipperfield’s architecture in mind, and she has also created a new group of monumental outdoor works, which sit in the gallery’s garden.
The Hepworth Wakefield art museum in West Yorkshire. Image Credit: HUFTON + CROW
Titled ‘Off Grid’, the retrospective includes more than 70 pieces, showcasing the breadth of Hicks’s work from the 1950s to today. Her collaborations and corporate commissions also come under the spotlight, while previously unseen photographs and notebooks documenting her extensive travels give viewers a rare and intimate glimpse into her myriad influences. Her passion for materials shines through: traditional fibres such as wool, silk, cotton and linen are in abundance, but so too are synthetic threads and recent inventions, such as pure pigmented acrylic. ‘I have no prejudices about materials’, she has said. ‘The more pliable they are and the more adaptable they are, the more I am attracted to them.’ Hicks has centred her life around making for more than 60 years, but, as her Wakefield exhibition reveals, it is her insatiable appetite for experimentation and collaboration that has come to define her remarkable practice.
