Bales of bright yellow, orange and red yarn, thousands of strands of coloured cotton and raffia, cords constructed in linen, wool and sisal greeted me at Galerie 3 of the Centre Pompidou in Paris. It was pure euphoria, as the vivid colours seemed to joyously welcome the visitors and art aficionados.
“…A body of work that moves freely between art, design and decoration, craftsmanship and industry, modernist heritage and non-Western traditions,” aptly describes Lignes de Vie /Life Lines, the solo exhibition of the yarn-spinner — the American-born Parisian artist Sheila Hicks — that was opened in February this year and ended in April.
Working with fibre is one of the oldest professions in the world using sisal, gained from agave plants, filaments and cords fashioned from forest materials, and wool obtained from animals such as sheep, camels, goats, llamas, yak, bison and even rabbits. Sheila Hicks, the grande dame of textile art, has been working in fibre since the late 1950s. Life Lines is her retrospective extravaganza that at first excites and then leaves the visitor highly inspired. However, how does one ‘categorise’ this work? Is it installation, is it sculpture, is it architecture? “No need,” the mind says.
Artist Sheila Hicks is a storyteller who tells epic tales with fibre
A curious combination of artist and anthropologist, Hicks studied at Yale University in the late 1950s, and the faculty included some notable figures in modern art, design and architecture, including Josef Albers and Louis Kahn. Their influence on her work is telling in the way the colours, forms and spaces get juxtaposed.
While the massive stacks and columns of fibre are of architectural proportions, her ‘Minimes’ (French for minimal) are small ‘sketches’ — tapestries that tell different stories. She has travelled around the world and carries not only a notepad but also a small, makeshift loom (instead of a laptop) in order to record her observations of the places and people she visits. Her creations are born out of these observations. She has been making Minimes since 1956 and nearly 100 feature in this show. They embody dexterity and concentration. The artist describes them as “nomadic”, “investigative” and “personally expressive” works as they are intimately linked to places and memories.
There is a large variety in ‘Lignes de Vie/Life Lines’ of numerous serpentine-like or buxom monumental creations that Hicks has been making and weaving. There are thick linen ropes alluding to wild vegetation and creepers that one wants to swing from a la Tarzan and Jane, and giant balls of wool in which to dive in, as they display the jubilation of the artist after assembling and installing these site-specific works.
I once read a beautiful analogy that someone wrote about her works, “She treats threads she weaves the way a novelist treats the various plot lines of story: she is attentive to their every twist and turn.” Indeed, she is a storyteller, telling epic tales with her yarns. As a fibre artist, she turns the humblest of materials such as twigs, threads and strings into compelling tapestries of accounts from here, there and everywhere.
Apparently, the 84-year-old Hicks once said that at Machu Picchu (in the Andes Mountains in Peru), weavers were buried with their looms, so they could keep working in the afterlife. “I’m inclined to that myself,” she says.
“Sheila Hicks — Lignes de Vie/Life Lines” was held at the Centre Pompidou in Paris from February 7 to April 30, 2018
Published in Dawn, EOS, June 3rd, 2018
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