The Sentinel Saffron | Photos by the writer
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.