Rue des Marronniers, Made in Paris, 1973
Alpaca and Silk, Collection of Monique Levi-Strauss

"I found my voice and my footing in my small work. It enabled me to build bridges between art, design, architecture, and decorative arts." - Sheila Hicks

We refer to woven materials as textiles, although many textiles are not woven. From the Latin word textilis and the French word texere, both meaning "to weave", textiles may actually be constructed by any number of methods including knitting, knotting, bonding, tufting and felting. Combine that with the word cloth from the Old English word cl th or "to adhere to", the word fabric which originally meant "the act of construction, of building or making", and in essence we fabric textile by making fibers cloth.

With that in mind, Sheila Hicks is more than a textile maker; she is an internationally recognized artist. An American born textile designer, Hicks started her career painting in Chile on a Fulbright scholarship in 1957. It was in Chile where she began to develop a passion for working with fibers. In India, she worked in a handloom factory producing commercial textiles. Since then, Hicks has founded several production facilities which use traditional methods in Mexico, Chile and South Africa and has set up a studio in Paris, the Ateliers des Grand Augustins. She divides her time between Paris and New York while teaching and working worldwide. Over the past fifty years, she has produced a number of large art commissions, in particular is the hanging for the conference room of the Ford Foundation in New York.

Known for her use of distinctive colors, experimental and natural materials, and personal narratives, these intriguing weavings reveal the emergence and continuity of the artist’s inventive approach to textile media, and a

unique connection between the artistic and design aspects of textiles. Her work is diverse, switching between miniatures and gigantic. Using a portable frame loom of her own design, Hicks employs a remarkably broad range of materials as well, such as cotton, wool, linen, silk, goat hair, alpaca, paper, leather, stainless steel, and found objects. All of which she turns into woven works of considerable beauty and intricate detail.

Shelia Hicks is currently enjoying a retrospective of her work at the Bard Graduate Center in New York City.

Nina Nina, Made in Cour de Rohan, Paris, 2005 Cotton and Wool