CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 10/10/2024

Textile as language in 'Sheila Hicks: Radical Vertical Inquiries'

At 90, Nebraska-born, Paris-based textile artist and sculptor Sheila Hicks is a living legend and an international treasure. Her new book, Radical Vertical Inquiries—fittingly sized at 5.5 x 12-inches—is at last on American shores, published by DelMonico Books and Galerie Frank Elbaz. Featured image is “Gabriel Reaching for Heaven” in the 2022 Hepworth Wakefield exhibition, Off Grid. “At The Hepworth the exhibition spills out into the garden,” Hicks is quoted. “I knew it was going to be a challenge: with architecture you can make friends, accommodate and negotiate, but in the garden, nature is going to do its own thing and take over no matter what. You think you can speak to flowers in a friendly way, but whatever you’re going to introduce into their domain, nature will confront. And so I was reluctant, but in the end I proposed a 5-meter-tall [16-foot-tall] tower that shoots upwards. . . . But you could see it out of one of the windows, you go to one of the corners and you say, ‘How did that get out there, what in the world is that? Who trucked this strange thing in, this tower, and put it in the garden?’”