Sheila Hicks
Photo: courtesy the artist and Alison Jacques
Sheila Hicks
United States born 1934, lived in France 1964–
Ground Level
NGV International
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PROJECT
Over the past seventy years Sheila Hicks has worked with textiles to challenge traditional boundaries between art forms. Often working with natural materials in vibrant colours, Hicks has knotted, weaved and tied sculptural forms out of wool, linen and silk. Hicks has spent extensive periods of time travelling, living and working around the world to extend her knowledge of textiles. She studied painting with Bauhaus artist and designer Josef Albers at Yale University, as well as pre-Colombian weaving with art historian George Kubler, and she has lived and worked in Chile, Mexico, South Africa, India, Morocco, Japan and Saudi Arabia.
Nowhere to go comprises fabric in shades of blue, gathered in nets to create boulders, demonstrating Hicks’s recent interest in large-scale, site-specific sculpture. Sitting in opposition to the hard surfaces of NGV’s architecture, Nowhere to go communicates Hicks’s attention to abstraction, colour theory and painterly gesture
ABOUT
Sheila Hicks is known internationally for her innovative and experimental weavings and sculptural textile art that incorporate distinctive colours, natural materials, and personal narratives. Hicks was born in Hastings, Nebraska, in 1934, but was nomadic from an early age. Hicks studied painting at Yale School of Art, and also studied pre-Columbian art and archaeology, and the textile culture in history. In 1957 Hicks travelled South America on a Fulbright Scholarship, methodically documenting and photographing. Sheila Hicks: 50 Years, 2010, debuted at the Addison Gallery of American Art. She was named a Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters by the French government in 1987 and was elevated to Officier in 1993. In 2022 the International Sculpture Center awarded Hicks with a Lifetime Achievement Award.
Purchased, NGVWA, 2022