‘Taking a Ride on a Thread’ with Sheila Hicks
Words by Donna McColm | Photography by Brigitte Lacombe
American-born, Paris-based artist Sheila Hicks is one of the world’s foremost contemporary artists. Lauded for her installations, weavings and voluminous sculptural works, Hicks came to prominence in the 1960s and 1970s. Now, at the age of 90, her work and legacy continue to captivate.
Hicks’ contemporary sculptural works have been included in major exhibitions, including the 2017 Venice Biennale and the 2014 Whitney Biennial in New York, as well as being held in the collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art and Museum of Modern Art, New York; Museum of Fine Arts Boston; The Art Institute of Chicago; and Victoria & Albert Museum, London.
Presented as part of the NGV Triennial at the National Gallery of Victoria (NGV), Melbourne, from December 2023, Hicks’ Nowhere to Go, 2022, is a major sculptural installation. Stacked high in a monumental mass, the rounded forms gather and create an imposing yet playful installation that celebrates the experience of architectural space, and the emotional potential of colour.
Handmade by Hicks’ small Parisian studio, the work is epic in scale – almost seven metres high – challenging notions of textile works as intimate, domestic, small and gendered.
A-M Journal invited Donna McColm, Assistant Director, Curatorial and Audience Engagement at National Gallery of Victoria, to speak with Hicks about her experiences, work and the Australian premiere of Nowhere to Go in the NGV Triennial.
Donna McColm: Sheila, we are so thrilled to bring your work into the NGV Collection, the first work by you to join a public museum in our country. Thank you for the opportunity to grow the collection with your work. It's been really exciting for us here in Melbourne.
Sheila Hicks: What makes me happy is to think that what we've sent out there now, it's going to stay. Special.
DM: Very special. It's amazing how flexible Nowhere to Go is despite the scale of the installation. It feels like the work contains a lot of freedom, and responsiveness to space. I'm also fascinated by the materials because, from what I understand, it starts as pigment.
SH: The material is not vegetable – it's pure mineral pigment from Turkey. And the pigment, once extracted, is like the basis of painting. All the painters use pure pigment, which is then processed with different kinds of binders, so they can paint either as oil painting or acrylic. So, this pigment is then sent to Germany, and an acrylic binder is joining and fluffing out the pigment into fibre, like bursts of fibre.
Once it's in this shape, it's fibre with an acrylic binding. It's then sent to United States and is transformed into fibre and thread. They will spin it. They'll twist. It'll be twisted, and it'll start to become thread. And then it'll be woven. Once woven, it becomes awnings for all of the brasseries and sidewalk cafés, and boat furniture and garden furniture, because it can resist sun and light. It's a fabulous, patented fibre and technique in which to weave materials that are sun-fast, lightproof and waterproof.
DM: So, it's paint first, and then it's fibre!
SH: It's every painting you have in your show. It starts from the same origin. It is kind of amazing. It's taking you one layer deeper than just the first visual impact, than the physical material itself. And some people are smearing it around on linen canvases or on paper in making paintings, and some people are using it in other ways.
DM: What's your impetus for using this particular material?
SH: When I went to art school, I was trained as a painter, but I had Bauhaus teachers who had great respect for materials and the way materials demanded to be honored. So, my feeling was every material you touched, whether it be a pencil to make a line or a brush to smear a color, or with no utensils whatsoever, with your hands, what can you devise?
I was very exploratory. And while I was doing paintings and drawings and lithographs and etchings and graphic design and calligraphy and typography, I swam with ease like a fish that was lost looking for a school. I never found a school that was completely open, so I just stayed in the free ocean and swam around. Everywhere I went, I tried to discover something.
One day I discovered pre-Columbian textiles in an art history course that I was sitting in, watching slides. You know how you sit for hours listening to art historians with slides in the dark. And a teacher flashed on screen a series of Peruvian mummy bundles, and I realised that Egyptians and a lot of cultures had used the idea of these ways of wrapping corpses and honoring the dead in some way.
I thought I might scratch that a bit below the surface, learn a little bit more about that. And so, my studies developed in a way that when I had to write papers, I thought I better learn more about these things that I was intrigued by, these mummy bundles.
I went to South America and I saw excavations and I saw things in museums and culture centers that were remnants of former civilisations, earlier life stuff. Everywhere I went, I saw that textiles were totally indicative of what was going on at that time, in time and space. They were a way to read.
It's like taking a ride on a thread and seeing where it takes you thousands of years back. And I thought, this is continuity. I can go a thousand years forward with the same line, a pliable, linear instrument that penetrates time and space, and that's what I'm trying to do.
DM: Sheila, obviously you wanted to be an artist, and formal education unlocks the possibilities of applying that curiosity in making art, but have you been able to pinpoint something even earlier in your life, or something that connected you with particular materials?
SH: I'm sure you can answer better than I because when's the first time you touched a material that interested you… If you close your eyes and think about what material you can remember? Because I would guess that the first material you discover and makes you wonder is material like weaving and textile and sheets and blankets. And so, you carry that all the way to the edge.
Like the mummy bundles, that's where you're going to end up also. How are you going to check out? In what way? Do you want to be wrapped in something or [do] you just want to be dumped in the water, or [do] you want to be cremated? And you looked at the spectrum, beginning to end, all the way.
And then some people start working at a certain point in their life of making things in which they want to take with them. Like the pre-Colombians or the Egyptians – you open the tombs and you see what they expected to take with them into the next life, and what they were making. And, also, in the making process, it's a way of concentrating. It's a way of being able to meditate and to think in a very focused way. And I think that idea of my involvement with this kind of material, a lot of it has to do with that.
DM: So, the idea of the materials is ever-evolving, and the potential is limitless, really.
SH: It's open-ended. It's like scientific experimentation now. It's always been, but we're more and more aware of it. Everything is evolving and changing. That's the way we're going, into space and with new experiences and new materials. Art has blown wide open because so many are playing and exploring, and the materials are creeping into the art field and proliferating at a big, big, big, rapid rate.
DM: It's changing.
SH: Material, title, material, dates. It's a grab bag. We're just inventing all these things.
DM: Regarding the visitors to the NGV Triennial who have the fortunate experience of seeing Nowhere to Go, what would you hope for them to take away from the experience of seeing the work?
SH: I have a few secret wishes. One of them, the people who are so-called pros, my wish is that they walk in when you give over a space and assign a guard to watch that space and the thing that's in it, my hope would be that these people who think they know everything, or quite a bit, walk in and say nothing. They just look and it sets off thinking and it sets off emotional experience of like, dislike, attraction, revulsion, curiosity. That's what I hope.
[Also] during the show, that the visitors want to come back frequently. Sit up there and with their computer or their telephone and plonk themselves and hang out and meet their friends there. It was an environment. It was a place to be.
DM: An invitation to them.
SH: So maybe that'll happen to your place.
DM: I have no doubt that it will happen here.
SH: If I'd be there, I'd go to the guards and then stuff this fibre in their pockets, and as they're standing there, people [would] come in and say, ‘The guard's even connected with it!’ A lot of our favourite artists were guards in museums.