Sheila Hicks, I wish I were a wave, 2018–26, linen on plinth, 21 × 48 × 25 cm. Courtesy the artist and Nara Roesler, São Paulo.
The artist’s recommendations include: going straight to the factory for the best materials, reading one’s post while seated, climbing stairs mindfully and listening to what old clothes are saying.
Before I get to ask Sheila Hicks a question on our video call, she has one for me. “Are you wearing a knitted sweater?” I tell her yes, and that it gets cold here in the mountains of Minas Gerais. “Are you sure it’s wool? What kind of wool?” I tell her it’s sheep’s wool and she seems placated. I think I understand better why her exhibition at Instituto Tomie Ohtake, São Paulo, is titled O que que é isso? (What Is This?). It was a question posed to her by her teacher Josef Albers during the late 1950s when she was studying under the former Bauhaus maestro at Yale, and it’s one that the ninety-two-year-old US artist has obviously adopted, having investigated the possibilities of textiles and colour for over 70 years now.
An early encounter during a lecture on pre-Columbian art and architecture with an image of Peruvian mummy bundles being unwrapped captured Hicks’s imagination in a profound way. That the dead had been buried with their tools – in particular, weaving baskets full of spindles and fibres – only made the sight more captivating. Hicks notes that from the moment we are born, we are wrapped in textile, and it is this deep human connection to threads that provides endless inspiration. Though often called a pioneer of ‘textile art’, Hicks refuses to be pigeonholed, and indeed her sculptures, ranging from small wall works – a recent selection of which is on show concurrently at Nara Roesler in São Paulo – to architectural installations, can be difficult to categorise. Loom-based or untethered, wrapped or bundled, piled or knotted, both natural and synthetic, fibre in Hicks’s hands is treated as matter and takes on unexpected and wildly varying form. The artist considers making and doing as ways of thinking about the world around her: seeing how others make and use textiles, how somebody ties their shoelaces, the particular scarf and jacket combination of a passerby or how a sock might begin to break and unravel through wear are all deeply embedded within her sculpture. For Hicks, textile presents a universal language fundamental to all societies, and she has received invitations to embed herself in cultures globally, facilitating her deep knowledge of and sensitivity towards traditional and nontraditional forms of textile construction.