Sheila Hicks

Description

Tent. New York, The Bard Graduate Center for Studies in the Decorative Arts, Design, and Culture, 12-07-2006, 15-10-2006. - Kunstenaarsboek van de Amerikaanse kunstenares Sheila Hicks met een overzicht van haar textiele ontwerpen. Publicatie vormgegeven door de Nederlandse vormgeefster Irma Boom Exhibition devoted to Sheila Hicks examined the small woven and wrought works that Hicks has produced for 50 years. With their distinctive colors, experimental and natural materials, and personal narratives, these intriguing weavings reveal the emergence and continuity of the artist's inventive approach to textile media, and a unique connection between the artistic and design aspects of textiles. The small woven forms are an essential means of creative expression for the artist. In addition, they provide a format for mastering approaches to materials and techniques that she then frequently applies to works of differing scales, including monumental site-specific commissions for public spaces and hand-woven and industrially produced fabrics. Using a portable frame loom of her own design, Hicks employs a remarkably broad range of materials, such as cotton, wool, linen, silk, goat hair, alpaca, paper, leather, stainless steel, and found objects. These woven works, of considerable beauty and intricate detail, document and reveal Hicks's artistic and personal journeys; they are simultaneously essays in design, intimate recollections, aesthetic forays, and tactile metaphors for language and human connection. Today Hicks is sought by architects and other patrons to execute "woven walls" that bring a human element to government and corporate offices. Weaving as Metaphor consisted of approximately 150 works from private and public collections in this country and abroad. The exhibition was arranged both chronologically and thematically to reveal the metaphorical and personal narratives, the diverse geographical areas where the weavings were made, and the artist's specific material and technical concerns. Beginning with Hicks's early years in Chile and Mexico, the exhibition presented her initial experiments with the small format, using mainly cotton and wool and pre-Columbian structures. This section included the "hieroglyph" works that were acquired by the Museum of Modern Art, her first institutional patron. After moving to Paris, she introduced so-called objets trouvés and fabricated whimsical commentaries about her professional and family life. The show continued by evoking the rich cultural diversity Hicks embraces in her work, using materials found or created in locations such as India, the Brittany coast, Morocco, Japan, and South Africa. The exhibition also considered the artist's fascinating technological innovations. Her stainless-steel, fiber-slit tapestries, for example, emphasize the material's aesthetic potential and its strength and immutability. The exhibition also included the artist's notebooks, drawings, photographs, and handmade loom.