Photos: Bastiaan van den Berg
absorbing them into her ruminations:
Clignan-
court
(i960) is a clutch of leather shoelaces,
silk, and cotton; a cousin,
La Clef(
1988),
is a knot of colored rubber bands. In
Foot-
prints (Rose)
(1978), the fine knit of socks
discarded by Carmelite nuns serves as her
warp and weft. Hicks has co-opted every-
thing from raw linen to hospital bedding,
surgeon’s smocks to nurse’s tunics, natural
cork to synthetic plumbing insulation tubes,
stainless steel fiber to silk and human hair.
In the past, Hicks’ large interior pieces
have had a degree of uniformity in material
and color that she would then abandon when
it came to pattern and texture. Today, her
installations drop the pretense of unifor-
mity: They look tangled, like
Prophecy From
Constantinople
(2008-10), vividly dread-
locked, like
The Principal Wife
(196 8), or
frizzy, like
Fight Sumo Balls
(2009), which
has since morphed into an installation
for Tony May’s newest New York eatery,
SD26. “Order, regularity, symmetry, repet-
itive patterns are often the basis of my
designs for bas-reliefs,” Hicks says, “and,
once mastered and measured, I delve into
their opposites.”
Even her miniature pieces, or
minimes
,
assume the asymmetry of a photograph, a
landscape’s irregularity of color and texture,
and all the unpredictability of real life
recorded. The French word
minime
literally
means “very small”; and though it also con-
notes “of very little significance,” her min-
iatures are of the first importance to Hicks.
She uses them as studies, sketches, and
material explorations:
RouladeAmazone
(1965), made of crushed, rolled, and sewn
pages from a natural history book, explored
a concept for larger sculptural pieces.
The
minimes
are also color experiments:
Wrapped and Coiled Traveler
(2009)
juxtaposes crimson, emerald, and cerulean;
the scruffy
M ’hamid
(1970), pierced by a
razor-clam shell, contrasts fuchsia and ecru;
WilBertheux
(1973) unites a punchy pink
with sultry fields of scarlet and crimson.
Narrowing stripes fade into beige in
Vanish-
ing Tellow
(1964/2004), while the tapestry
Color Alphabet II/VI
(1988) lines up 49
“letters” on a white ground, square swatches
of pigment that form the elements of Hicks’
loudly unspoken language. “ ‘Emotional and
intuitive observation’ might describe my
methodology for working with color,”
Hicks explains.
Being keenly observant is, perhaps, the
legacy of an itinerant youth when Hicks
moved, from her birth in Nebraska to col-
lege at Syracuse University, through at least
eight Midwestern states. At Yale she studied
color under Bauhaus veteran Josef Albers
and audited Louis Kahn’s architecture
Faja ft
(detail),
1956
cotton, wool
21
X
5 in.
Roulade Amazone,
1965
crushed, rolled,
and sewn
printed paper
6-75x3.5 in.
H i c k s ’ s m a l l p i e c e s a r e v i b r a n t t e s t i n g g r o u n d s f o r t h e b i g o n e s .
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