Since the late 1950s, Sheila Hicks has been producing work exceptionally difficult to categorise. Knotting, wrapping, folding, twisting and stacking wool, linen and cotton: these are only some of the techniques and materials that have seen her undermine conventional artistic categories and their hierarchical relationships. A pupil of Josef Albers at Yale, Sheila Hicks is the heir to both a Modernist spirit that holds the distinctions between fine art, decoration and design to be unimportant and a textile practice that has its roots in pre-Columbian America.
If Sheila Hicks chose textiles, it is because from clothes to furniture, interior decoration and on to the canvas that undergirds the high art of painting, these are materials that life constantly puts in our way, in a vast variety of contexts. It also allows works to remain alive, taking different forms each time they are shown. Ductile and tactile, Hicks’s work occupies a singular place in the art of our time. It combines forms typical of modernism with non-Western traditions, the play of colour, and a concern to maintain the vital openness of the work. ...
