The designer transforms ancient weaving techniques into original textile installations

2024 Author: Richard Flannagan | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-15 23:55

Contemporary art can be shocking, scandalous, unpleasant - or cozy, touching and enchanting, like Sheila Hicks' huge textile installations. For more than half a century, the artist has been proving that traditional, ancient weaving technologies are not at all a relic of the past, but an art designed to please people.

Sheila Hicks was born in the United States in 1934. Mom taught her to sew, grandmother taught her to embroider, and teachers at Yale University taught her to think, explore, look for something new … Sheila was lucky to meet the Albers couple - graduates and teachers of the Bauhaus, who moved to the United States during the war and worked at Yale. Josef Albers drew attention to the talented student and introduced her to his wife. Annie Albers was once the star of the weaving workshop. Sheila recalled how, after talking with Annie, she felt a real epiphany and a strange, almost religious feeling.

Since childhood, Hicks loved to work with fabric, and therefore she determined her path in art very early. There were no painful creative searches in her life - she knew everything in advance. Her thesis on the textiles of America's ancient cultures shocked even the harshest of critics. Sheila was awarded a Fulbright Fellowship, allowing her to embark on a creative journey through Latin America. She was going to explore traditional painting and architecture - but you can't be fooled. Hicks plunged headlong into the study of weaving in pre-Columbian America. Tapestries, woven patterns, woven canvases, new rhythms, forms, ways of interaction … Later Sheila, in search of inspiration and knowledge, traveled to Morocco, India, Chile, Sweden, Israel, Saudi Arabia, Japan and South Africa. She communicated with ethnographers, culturologists and anthropologists. Over time, the admiration for national crafts added … anger. Sheila was outraged that the rich possibilities of textiles and traditional technologies are not being embodied in art - "real", elite art, which has a place in museums and on the art market. "Weaver" - it sounds proudly and certainly no worse than "artist"!

In Mexico, Sheila married a beekeeper named Henrik Tati Shlubach and became a mother - the couple had a daughter, Ithaca. But … the role of wife and mother was too close for her. Hicks opened her own weaving workshop and there she created her first large-scale woven panels. She combined wool and flax fibers with pieces of plastic and slate, shells of clams and beads, laces and strips of rubber, fragments of second-hand clothes … It was then that Hicks began teaching. However, Mexico was small for the artist's creative ambitions. Her marriage began to come apart at the seams … and Sheila chose art.

Together with her daughter, Hicks moved to Paris, where she lives to this day. Shlubach and Mexico are a thing of the past. Two years later, she married again - this time to an artist who already had a daughter from a previous marriage. In this union, Hicks had a son, who also preferred a career in the field of art. In 1966, Hicks received her first major order - she designed for Knoll (with whom many of the iconic designers of our time have collaborated) a variegated Inca fabric, inspired by the Andean textiles. Hicks loved to collaborate with architects - despite her creative individualism, teamwork inspires her. And although Hicks dreamed of bringing weaving to museums, her works delight those who are far from art. Her textile compositions can be found at the airport. Kennedy and the building of the Ford Foundation in New York, she created the curtain for the assembly hall of the Institute of Technology in the American city of Rochester with her own hands … Not all of Hicks' works were lucky - some of her interior projects were seriously interfered with and even destroyed. But it was Hicks' major design projects that attracted the attention of gallery owners and art critics to her - and not only. The famous philosopher, ethnographer and sociologist Claude Lévi-Strauss said about it this way: "Nothing can better than this art serve as both an ornament and an antidote to the functional and utilitarian architecture to which we are condemned."

And then there was fame, international recognition, numerous exhibitions, projects and expeditions … Huge installations and woven panels, threads hanging from the ceiling and amorphous woven objects, strange combinations of materials and technologies that are thousands of years old - all this is the work of Sheila Hicks.

The works of the “art weaver” Sheila Hicks are recognized masterpieces of contemporary art. They are especially loved by gallery owners for their interactivity - visitors to exhibitions, especially children, simply adore “swimming” in soft textile balls or wandering among woven “boulders”, and any contact with a person modifies Hicks' works, gives them new forms. The artist always works conscientiously - her works must "withstand rough mechanical interference." Sheila's installations and panels can be found at the Tate Gallery, the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, the Steidelic Museum in Amsterdam, the Paris Pompidou Center, the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Metropolitan Museum, in the museums of Chicago, Miami, Santiago and Omaha.

She talks a lot about the role of art, but almost never - about how ideas for new installations come to her mind, about the meaning of her work and even about technology. And Hicks doesn't like questions about the creative process. “It's like looking at a drawing and asking which pencil I'm using. Looking at the drawing, you want to know which pencil or pen am I using or which paper? She often does not sign her works, believing that the object of art is more important than the author.

Hicks also believes that art can solve difficult social problems. In 2000, a group of artists led by Sheila Hicks traveled to Cape Town on a UNESCO program. There, they trained local women in the skills of producing items for sale, which would bring them financial independence. Today, despite her advanced age, the artist is interested in the problems of ecology, recycling, and biodegradable materials - and is full of creative plans.