Artist Sheila Hicks: We’re Crying for Softness

Some people think I'm working, but they don't realize I'm thinking. You lose a lot of time thinking. Might as well be producing or making something while you're thinking. What do you mean by thinking? Well, what is happening? What am I concerned about? What would I like to accomplish or do today or tomorrow? And how am I going to do it? And in order to do it, what do I have to exclude or avoid? How can I get through the next 24 hours with the least amount of perturbation? Because Paris is a very noisy, busy, confusing, chaotic city. And I live right in the middle of it. And I'd like to still have an advantage of being in a nice, cultural and beautiful and interesting place, but also to keep my peace of mind and quiet, too. So I have to find a way to do that. And I can sit still and quietly and think and practically solve all these problems while I'm having a coffee. The subject is art. Art is a big word. I don't remember when I got interested in art. I don't remember when it began. It wasn't a conscious decision. I'm still not sure what it means. I know what I like to do, and I am trying to figure out how to do it. But I don't have an objective or a thought that I am an artist, or I am becoming or establishing myself as an artist. I'm just taking every day as it comes. Sitting in the back of a car as a child, you're a hostage. You look out the window. What's going on out the window sparks your imagination of wondering if you could be a participant. If you climbed out of the car, when you pulled into a gas station, you could roll the window down and you could climb out and become part of another existence. I'm still thinking the same way. For me, moving around, working, looking out the window causes me to imagine different existences simultaneously. One day, one place, one street, another parallel street. When I have to do errands, I walk not always down the same street. I change streets. Maybe even walk backwards to see how things look. If I look retrospectively, you see I can pretend that I have a theory of some kind, but I don't. I think I have only observed segments and applied them to actuality, but I don't think I have a philosophical explanation of having formulated my existence around those early years. So that's given me a sense of fearlessness. Some of my family and friends don't think it's fearlessness. They think it's innocence or worse than innocence, stupidity. Just to leave yourself so open to the unknown and then to find a way to weave it into your daily existence. I just went to any school that was in the neighborhood where we were living, the closest one. I was accumulating all of these experiences. Not choosing them, because if the program is there, you push the buttons and those are the classes you register for and there you go. But during one vacation, a fellow student said, I think the dean of our school here that we like is leaving and who knows who will be coming next year. Why don't we have an alternative of another school as a backup? And she took her and my portfolio of all of our drawings and prints and things and she applied to Yale. It wasn't my idea. It's a stupid story. But she came back and told me after vacation we'd both been accepted by a German sort of tough guy, but charming, as the Germans can be. And they gave us advanced standing if we wanted to come to his school. And that was the Yale Art School and that was Joseph Elbers. So you see, I'm winding down the road again, keeping the window open, and I find myself now in a fantastic school with a very hardcore program. And it looks like I'm going into art, but not pretentiously. More as a voyage of discovery. I took an art history course every semester and one day something flashed on the screen that really intrigued me. It was a lecture in George Kubler's class about pre-Columbian art history, pre-Columbian architecture and art history. So I saw Machu Picchu and I saw these photographs of mummy bundles, mummies that had been excavated. And I saw photos of mummies being unwrapped. When we think of mummies, we immediately jump to Egypt. But there I was in a dark room, watching Peruvian mummy bundles being unwrapped. And in the Peruvian mummy bundles and tombs, people had been... entouré, had been buried with their tools that they used for working. What caught my interest were the weaving baskets with all of the spindles and tools and threads. As I was finishing my degree in painting in 1957, Albert said, what are you going to do next, girl? And I didn't know. So, Azo, go down to the office and sign the papers I left for you. And you'll see, it'll be very interesting. And it was papers saying that I was going on a Fulbright scholarship to Chile. I went down, I signed them, and then I went back to the library to see where was Chile. You have to have confidence in your teacher. He told me one day, go down to the office, I'm going to take you home to meet my wife. And the student next to me said, later? No way. You don't go home with your teacher to meet his wife. This was a guy who had me and my interests in mind. I said, I don't think I have much choice. He said, well, be careful. And Elvis forced me to go home with him to meet his wife. I'm not sure she was so happy. But he left me and went down to the basement and painted. That's where his studio was, down in the basement. And I sat, and he said, bring the things you're working on. I was trying to teach myself how to weave in order to write a paper about pre-Columbian textiles made on backstrap loom, which meant no loom. It just meant two sticks or two branches, one tied to a tree and one tied to you, and that you could stretch and make tension of threads and introduce threads into what they call the warp. I was doing this in a very improvised way. He thought it was probably hilarious, thought it was very funny, and he thought it would be entertaining for me to show this to his wife, how this out-to-didact student thought she was weaving. She didn't think it was very funny. He had more of a sense of humor. But she was kind, she looked, and she gave me some advice. Now, from there to Chile, I find out, why is he sending me to Chile? Because he and his wife had been to Chile, and they established an extension of a kind of Bauhaus program in the Universidad Católica in Santiago, invited by the dean named Sergio Larraín, architect. And he had told them, I'll send you a student every year to perpetuate this course. So he had sent another student a year before me, and this year was my turn to go and teach Albert's basic design, color, two- and three-dimensional design to young architecture students in the Universidad Católica. I think he was playing a joke on me somewhat. The whole class were boys. I was not very proficient in Spanish, but I knew his course forward and backward, and I had done his exercises, upside down and backwards and in every direction. So I knew all of that was in my hand of cards. You can play with the colors and see if one is overlapping the other. How will it be affected, you see? Mix these two colors. But you have to choose the piece of color, this color. Imagine, imagine what happens if they come. If this is the same color, how will it look if it's on different backgrounds? Same color scarf going on two different shirts. Fuchsia meets emerald. What happens in between? One kills the other. This looks like nothing at all until I do this. And when I do this, it starts to become something. Amazing, amazing. How'd that happen? Try another one. Another color? Yeah. Thank you. You ever seen anything like that? Isn't it extraordinary? Can you imagine what color can do to your life? What happened? How did he get over into her territory? He's invading. I can live anywhere. I'll figure it out. I'll find the nice side of wherever I happen to be. But Paris makes it easier for you. Don't have to work so hard to find a nice market, good food, beautiful sky. Paris invites you and makes it easy for you. So probably I'm lazy. And I'm just taking the... I know I could live anywhere. But as long as I found my way here, there was a Frenchman who intimidated me because when I came back from South America and after I lived in Mexico, or even before I lived in Mexico, the French have a very proud, I won't say pretentious because I have a son and I don't consider him pretentious, but he's proud. This Frenchman, very cultivated gentleman, said to me, you might as well figure it out when you're young. You'll never be a truly cultivated woman until you know La France. I'm prepared to give you a bourse and scholarship to go and get acquainted. We usually give it to a boy. This year we're going to give it to a girl, and maybe you're the girl. But don't just become a baby factory and disappear because it's not going to help the other girls who'll come after you. I took that pretty seriously. First of all, I thought, who does this guy think he is? I'll never be a truly cultivated woman unless I know La France. Big joke. Become a baby factory. I mean, where's his head, this guy? Where would he be if his mother hadn't been a baby factory? And then, for the sake of when he's telling me, don't deceive me and disappear because what do we do with all the other girls standing in line? There is a certain responsibility when someone hands you fish for free in the market and says now, you know, there are people who know how to make 100 people eat from a fish, and there are others who just eat the whole thing and walk away. I thought there is a certain responsibility here. I took all of those seriously, you see? And you ask me why I'm here? I don't know, because the guy told me come and check it out. I did. I made friends. I made a lot of tentative, explorative kind of relationships and experiences. And up to now, it's fine because there's an airport. It's very simple. I can go anywhere I want in the world. I'm very alert to how people package themselves, what they choose to live with on their own bodies and touching. So while painting and drawing, I always had textiles. I was surrounded by always choosing in the popular markets and anywhere I went, textiles that appealed to me and trying to figure out how they were made. I was fascinated like a crossword puzzle. How is this a single thread that moves around and becomes a knitting or a crochet or a tubular form? Or is it two networks of threads that interlace in different positions and become a weaving or a textile or a tapestry? Is it interesting in the front? Is it interesting in the back? Which is nicer? Is it strong? Does it hold? Does it become a hammock? Can you sleep in it? Is it a necktie that you have to look at across the dinner table of someone with very bad taste and you have to just smile and bear the dinner looking at this terrible textile? So I've always been sensitive to textile. Little did I know it could be art. I mean, I still don't think it. I know the French hold tapestry in very high esteem and I honor people's value systems. But for me, the familiarity of textile is what enchants me. It's not the art aspect. It's very concrete. If you work with thread material and you just do a cross stitch and you go to bed at night and wake up in the morning, you're going to see that cross stitch. But in the morning, if you've just been talking on the telephone or peeling carrots or hanging out on Instagram, you're not going to see anything the following day except an accumulation of information. And the immense accumulation of information that we're taking in now, it tends to be a massidoine. It tends to be a sort of mixture that finally, one thing cancels out the other. It's so overwhelming. But if you sit and cross two threads and then the next day cross three more and then you move them over a little bit to the left or a little bit to the right or you tie your shoelaces in a new way and you look down on the train at the person in front of you who's tied their shoelaces in a different way and you wonder, I wonder if they invented that or who did? The unexpected, huh? There's two works of art, right? For me, that's two works of art. I don't know if you'd call it art, but that's two works. And the unpredictability of this, the way it's behaving now is more interesting. Huh? The positive and the negative. Who doesn't like surprises? Well, some people don't like surprises. I like surprises. And in textiles and crossing of threads, textures and colors, you're bound to run into surprises. You wear out a sock, it ruptures and the sock splits and all the threads burst, don't they? You take off the sock. You wash it. You hang it up. You see the light coming through. Now you've got positive and negative. And you've got lines. You've got converging lines and lines that are bursting open with different tension. You take a photograph on your iPhone. You look at it after lunch and you say, this sculpture is beautiful. This sculpture is dimensional, the way the light and the way it's moving. And it has the kind of tactile quality to it that bronze, steel, stone, and wood don't have. So what is its specificity? What makes it specific? It's because it's soft. And in the world we live with so many hard things that we touch and live in, we're crying for softness. We're yearning and migrating toward softness. Why do people nestle one to the other or move and sort of touch each other? We're all yearning for something that is warm, welcoming, and soft in the hard, hard world. What's better than textiles and fiber? So naturally, since they're in everybody's existence from birth to death, from the time you're born, I've often repeated this, everybody knows this, from the time you're born until you die, you're enveloped in textiles. So why not the best? And why not the ones you like the best and the ones you feel the best in? And you're living with people. You're having children, family, environments. Why not have a great environment with such simplicity of means, which is just the right threads in the right places? Is there something that defines freedom? I hope not. I mean, you get pigeonholed, right? If you get pigeonholed, you sort of do the same thing all the time. I think it's... To be alive is to sort of discover. So quit along the way and you sort of check out. So hang in there, because you never know what the next discovery might be. Hang in there.