Art, Georgia O'Keeffe believed that, comes from “the desire to make the unknown… It seems that we have gone for many years from that dynamic force, most of the cultural product of our time that aims to make the market more known – its preferences proven in a profitable way, its interests, its behavioral fashions – to meet nature in it, to show strength -a sign that is enough to be viral.
At all times, there are those who do what they do from a place of joyful creative vitality without concern for validation, those who refuse to mistake the conditions of their culture for granted and choose to make what they want to see exist – unique, untested, unparalleled – for the world to take or leave. The price is often great loneliness, the reward is deep peace.
Sheila Hicks it is a living symbol of that defiant, countercultural courage to create rather than provide.
For the better part of a century – since before the splitting of the atom, before the signing of the Civil Rights Act, before the invention of the laser and duct-tape and the Internet – he has been making koans out of fiber, visual poems that reach for something beyond description, something, like the beauty of nature without need, with ease. is something. Although his work has been shown in all the major museums and has been described by all the major magazines, the recognition goes as an afterthought, consistent and as insignificant as the perfume of a stranger, over his entire sensitive area of feeling.
At ninety-two, Hicks opens the door to his life and work – which are clearly one and the same – with chaos. It is Time Sensitive in the interview, where he kept pushing back to be classified as an artist. With an eye on how labels and categories change content, reducing process to product, he shows:
I don't even think creatively. People want to draw me into art all the time… Is this art or not this art… What is art? I think people do what they feel like doing, not to confirm things. These podcasts and these interviews and this reporting and these shows, a lot of it has to do with trying to confirm things, to confirm things. Here in Paris, we have a hundred exhibitions opening every week. What do we guarantee? And if you are not confirmed and if you are not shown, what do you do? Are you wasting your time or just doing what you love to do and love to do?
It's a sentiment not unlike what the legendary cellist Pablo Casals said, at the age of ninety-three, about the secret of creative power and what Rachel Carson advises the aspiring writer: “If you write what you yourself honestly think and feel and are interested in, there is a much greater chance that you will be interested in other people.”
Holding up a large stick completely covered in an intricate pattern of colored cloth and thread, Hicks adds:
When I did this, I didn't do it with the intention that it should be art or craft or design or decoration. Or what is it? It is what it is is something. Take it or leave it.
Fill it with some advice on becoming an artist from Bowie, Beethoven, and MC Richards, and revisit Virginia Woolf's classic epiphany about what it means to create.
For Hicks, watch his singular spirit blossom in this tender short film:
