Sheila Hicks: I’m going to start with an experience I had as a child:
playing hide and seek in corn fields.
And being very close in touch with nature and experiencing it physically.
I didn’t realize at the time how much that would carry forth, but I can see, now,
that these are quite often throwbacks from impressions of very, very early childhood.
I have no prejudices about materials.
The more pliable they are, and the more adaptable they are,
the more I am attracted to them.
So if I’m walking down the street, I’m consciously exploring almost like a ragpicker
what I might be able to take and make with.
You’re going to cut the red one right in the middle. Okay? Just right here.
I have often thought color and texture and form are inextricably linked.
It all happens in one swoop of a concept that ignites an idea,
and it ignites in a way that it all happens at the same time.
You can’t do this to much art!
You see how it breathes?
Isn’t that great?
Front and back.
And when you’re finished you just sort of, that’s what I did, you just sort of roll it up
and take it with you from Mexico up to New York.
It’s the needle and a thread,
as it travels, your thoughts travel with it.
And you open a sentence and you begin moving it,
and then you get to the end of the sentence,
and you punctuate it.
It bridges to the next thought,
and when you’ve gotten to the fourteenth or fifteenth line,
you’ve more or less written a letter to someone.
So much of weaving is a grid.
The grid is what most of our lives are built around.
and then the deviants,
The deviation, deviants are people I know,
Deviance of the way people refuse to stick to the grid.
Why does the thread have to obediently cross, or warp around the corner up and down?
Maybe it can just twirl, and wrap around.
Small, insignificant things, like an insect crawling across a table
and squatting on a flower,
can make an indelible impression on me,
and it becomes something that might be twenty meters long.
I managed to make something that looked as though it was coming and falling out of the ceiling,
or maybe had started on the ground and reached as a Pillar of Inquiry
of looking for something, searching for something.
What you’re basically trying to do is show that these things can misbehave,
And they don’t have to stay in line.
I went for the idea of causing you to look upward.
Can I manage to convince them to break through the ceiling,
and inquiring what is upstairs and what is even further,
and what is 100 miles upward?
Instead of it being so repetitiously even like this,
I’d like it once in a while to break open and breathe a bit, and sort of widen, breathe.
Are we going to use the same materials we’ve always used?
We’d never get to the moon if we always did it the same old way.
So I’m using materials that have potential and new qualities and new abilities.
I’m feeling pretty well grounded,
and I’m feeling the courage to continue to reach upward,
and the Pillar of Inquiry is wide open.