When we talk about yarns and threads, we automatically think about handmade garments, accessories or small objects for our houses.
But yarns and threads could be considered in a more conceptual way as the strands of a story, and therefore as ways to build complex narratives.
This is exactly how American textile artist Sheila Hicks conceives the materials - including natural and synthetic fibres - she employs in her artworks.
The New York-based Sikkema Jenkins Gallery is currently paying homage to Hicks with a dedicated exhibition.
Born in 1934 in a small town in Nebraska, and educated at Yale where she was taught by Bauhaus teacher Josef Albers, who introduced her to his wife Anni, a textile artist, Hicks lived in Paris since the '60s.
She worked with different media including painting, sculpture, photography, weaving and fabric design, incorporating in her works materials as different as fibres and found objects.
Rather than developing just a language of textiles, she developed an entire semantics, managing to spark new and impossible dialogues between different materials.
In her career Hicks collaborated with famous architects (she did for example a wall hanging for Eero Saarinen’s CBS building in New York), worked as a textile consultant for companies such as Knoll Associates and with artisanal workshops in Mexico, Chile (in her twenties she went to South America and spent a year working with local weavers and studying their techniques), India (she developed with the Calicut-based hand-weaving workshop Commonwealth Trust, textiles woven on traditional looms) Morocco (where she worked in carpet workshops on upright looms) and South Africa.
In her quest for the perfect material to incorporate in her work, she also helped developing an iridescent steel fiber for a Japanese tire company (ask yourself now, how many fashion designer actually develop/patent any special material in their careers?).
Hicks' monumental installations during art biennale events and public commissions - among the most famous ones there are linen and silk bas-relief tapestries for the Ford Foundation headquarters in Manhattan (1966-67); hand stitched wall hangings for a fleet of Air France 747s (1969-77), commissions for King Saud University in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, (1982-85) and a cultural center in Fuji City, Japan (1992-93) - are perfect examples of her versatile skills and techniques (stitching, wrapping, braiding, weaving and twining...).
The exhibition at the Sikkema Jenkins Gallery - including works from 1958 and composed of both natural fibers and found materials - features both larger installations and sculptures and small woven works, the framed abstract weavings the artist calls “minimes”.
Colour is the key to understand some of her pieces, texture the keyword to unlock the message behind other works, but the best thing is the continuity between the smaller pieces and the free-standing large sculptures.
It is indeed this continuity that reveals Hicks' careful observation of her surroundings and her distinctive use of different materials and weaving techniques employed to create innovative tapestry and textiles suspended between art, design, and architecture.
"Sheila Hicks" is at the Sikkema Jenkins Gallery, New York, until 2nd June 2012.
Images:
"Oracle from Constantinople", 2008-10
Linen
"La Clef", 1988
Rubber bands and metal key
"Ardoise", 2006
Mono filament, linen and slate
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I love all these yarns and threats there are so cool! You get such cool fabrics, styles and Accoutrements?if only I knew how to knit. I would be a great man – sorry, I mean woman. lol! :)
Posted by: 888ladiesblog | May 28, 2012 at 07:47 PM