Sheila Hicks: THREAD TREES RIVER

Interview for the publication on the Personale at the MAK

On the occasion of Sheila Hicks' personal exhibition at the MAK "Yarn, Trees, River", a limited edition catalog edited by Christoph Thun-Hohenstein and Bärbel Vischer has been published. In addition to photographic documentation of the exhibition and contributions by director Christoph Thun-Hohenstein and curator Bärbel Vischer, the bilingual artist publication also includes an interview conducted by Itai Margula with the artist:

Sheila Hicks: [...] I always start with light. As an architect, what do you start with?

Itai Margula: Maybe with functionality and the needs of the people who will use the space. Later, light is also a very important factor. - You build unique one-to-one models. Do you also work with scale models of your works?

Sheila Hicks: I always start working at an intimately small scale, the size of a normal notebook page. Then I close my eyes and think in terms of space, projection, climate, and interior versus exterior. Sometimes I develop my ideas on a huge scale, thinking multi-dimensionally - not just two-dimensionally as in a drawing on a page, but more in the categories of a rock, a stone, or a bubble. Then the scale gets bigger, bigger than a head or a whole person, until it is really very big. Functionality then ranks a little lower than you do. In fact, if you're interested in art, you have to make yourself appreciated and indispensable in a poetic way, and in a way that's not always clearly functional, but psychologically vital. [...]

EDITORS Christoph Thun-Hohenstein and Bärbel Fischer (MAK)
INTERVIEW Itai Margula
PUBLISHER arnoldsche Art Publishers
YEAR OF PUBLICATION 2021
FOTOS arnoldsche Art Publishers