Sheila Hicks has devoted her career to exploring the aesthetic and structural qualities of fiber in new contexts. Her work challenges the functional mandate of conventional textiles, as well as the sexism inherent in artistic hierarchies. As she explains in the film Tissages Métissés (The Weaving Art, 1987), “I want things that I make, and the things that others make with this material, to receive as much consideration as painting, sculpture, drawing, photography. So I make an effort to enter examples of these things into public viewing spaces…to elevate it further in the eyes of those who look at the art of our time.” Hicks’s blurring of boundaries and pioneering efforts to explore the structural potential of soft material have established fiber as a dynamic medium for the expression of form... see the entire article in the print version of October’s Sculpture magazine.
