Artist Spotlight: Candace Hicks

Aug 8

A feature essay drawn from a March 2024 interview with Kacie L. Wills and Olivia Loksing Moy

On October 26, 2023, students from an English senior seminar at the City University of New York visited the Fales Collection at NYU’s Bobst Library. They had spent their semester on a course titled “Commonplacing and Canonbusting,” where they explored commonplace books, small coterie publications, and zines as alternatives to print textbooks and anthologies. The focus on commonplacing allowed them to study minor or anonymous authors rather than the typical Romantic authors or The Big Six, and their study of book history helped them to appreciate magazine clippings, recipes or “receipts,” watercolor drawings, stamps, locks of hair, leaves, and pressed flowers as material frequently included in historical commonplace books, objects not to be found in their typical college course books but worthy of literary study.

Charlotte Priddle, Director of NYU Special Collections, had selected a number of interesting artifacts for the students to study, in preparation tow rite their assigned “field report” focusing on one object. Among them were a bilingual Spanish-English recipe book from the 1920s, a communal commonplace book kept by injured but recovering British soldiers at the front line of the WWI, and BLAST! Magazine. But the students walked right by BLAST!, clustering instead around a hand-sewn cloth book that resembled a composition notebook. They seemed magnetized to the art object modeled after the familiar sight— the single most identifiable object in the arsenal of school life— and they marveled at how long it must have taken the artist to create it. They were astounded by the effort, discipline, time, creativity, and skill behind the creation of this object.

Compared to the sewn letters in thread, carefully embroidered by hand, the students’ handwritten notetaking and copying throughout the term (required for class, done with pen or pencil on paper) paled in comparison. As one student wrote: “During my visit to the Fales Collection at Bobst Library, I was particularly intrigued by a notable artifact known as the commonplace book authored by Candace Hicks. This remarkable piece, Common Threads, Volume 114, was created in Nacogdoches, Texas in 2019. It is a composition notebook adorned with black bicycles on its front cover, presenting a striking contrast of white and black. What sets this book apart is the author's meticulous attention to detail, as she recreates the classic composition notebooks in cloth form and skillfully embroiders text onto the fabric pages. It is worth noting that the entire book is meticulously sewn together, seamlessly integrating the words within its structure” (Krismely Diaz, ENG 350 student).

Candace Hicks is a Texas-based artist and an associate professor at Stephen F. Austin State University in Nacogdoches. Her series Common Threads, begun in 2003, consists of 147 volumes of hand-sewn books. The text of each book centers around collected coincidences – bits of repeated phrases she may have encountered across books she is reading, podcasts she is listening to, some lines or occurrences in a dream. She brings them together in each of her volumes, all of which are eight pages long, first penciled out and then sewn by hand. Hicks does not sew the lines in linear fashion, from left to right. Because she is right-handed, it is in fact more comfortable to sew from right to left, or turn the cloth book around in her hand, approaching it from different angles, frequently changing positions and direction. Hicks was by no means an expert sewer when she began the project, but has since learned not only a range of new stitches, but their proper names and execution.

Hicks considers herself a “dilettante,” and this organic sense of exploration without restraint of an end goal is central to the longevity of the ongoing Common Threads series. Each time she thinks she may have completed her last volume, another exciting coincidence arises, and she is inspired to create another. Yet the designation of “dilettante” is a humble understatement for this storied, professional book artist. Hicks’ works can be found in public collections at the Boston Athenaeum, the Museum of Modern Art, the Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco, and Deutsche National Bibliothek, Book and Print Museum in Leipzig, Germany, as well as fine arts museums and libraries at institutions such as Harvard, Yale, Brown, Stanford, and many others. She has taught courses at the Center for Book Arts in New York City. Co-editors Kacie Wills and Olivia Moy had the pleasure of speaking with Hicks, to probe further into her artistic process and her bookish tendencies, and to touch on questions of inscription and writing.

Common Threads series (2003-present)

Commonplacing was innovated to serve a simple mnemonic function: to keep bits of information or wisdom, or useful quotes, in one common place, for later access. Hicks’ Common Threads, a title chosen for its strong punning potential, captures strong resonances with the historical practice of commonplacing, though this was not the artist’s original intent. In its most basic conception, the common thread across these works is Hicks herself: each author, title, passage referenced in the volumes of Common Threads represents her own unique curation of reading, almost forming a massive compendium or commonplace book through the echoes and coincidences she hears from the external world. Hicks is interested in books because the selection of what we read is finite and ordered—as if comprising one large book of our life. She describes herself as “cataloging ways I make meaning out of coincidental incidences that are more or less because of random selection,” like the selection of what books to read that “in a lifetime of reading feels singular for each individual reader.” Hicks shared that she loves reading because she is not trying to get anything specific out of it; she is attracted to the completely unexpected. And, in the repetition that follows as she constructs her work in response, meaning is created. As she points out, repetition “primes us” to pay attention to something specific and think more deeply about something. There is something in this process of “a happy accident."

“I love the idea of making something in all seriousness but without knowing what the goal of it is.”

Since the Common Threads series, Hicks has also produced new art projects very much in conversation with this deep connection across books, material cultures of reading, bookmaking, and the visual arts. They highlight the connections between paper and cloth (paper was originally created by boiling rags, and high-quality paper today has high fiber content); paper and linen; sewing and writing; etc. Those projects include Notes for String Theory, Dioramas, Murder Mysteries, a giant Quilt, a handwriting machine project, and papercraft.

Next year, Hicks will be on a Fulbright in France, where she will begin collaboratively working with others as the director of an art project. This move, in many ways, echoes the turn in commonplacing that took place in the nineteenth century, where commonplace books became collaborative spaces of exchange and creativity among friends, families, and communities. Following the interview on March 18, 2024 with editors Kacie Wills and Olivia Loksing Moy, Hicks shared her notes and artist statements on projects since Uncommon Threads.

Notes for String Theory:

These hand-embroidered pages confront the existential possibilities of the blank page. The size, format, and color palette of notebook paper, they are familiar and warped at the same time. From across the room, they appear as flat, linear designs, but upon closer inspection reveal themselves to be delicately textured. My work has taken literature as its subject for many years, and writing has been central to my artistic practice. As Covid-19 changed all our lives, I found it arrested my ability to compose a coherent text. The stories and commentary that had previously poured out of me were now blocked. I began drawing versions of a blank sheet of paper in blue thread onto canvas. Where I had previously embroidered the text and illustrations of my artist’s books, I created a void. Not the first or last to confront the dread of the blank page or to bend writer’s block into subject matter, I have named my humble drawings for the theoretical framework uniting all matter and forces at play in the universe.

Paper craft work:

Believing that the stories we tell each other can reveal more about our values and biases than mundane experience, I mine genre fictions to uncover the subtle ways that literature reflects inequalities. My recent project, Paper Cuts, a series of paper craft compositions, offers alternatives to crime book cover illustrations. Fictional victims are represented in my work as dispassionately as they are depicted in stories, often subordinated by the setting in which they are situated. Though men are much more likely to die as a result of violence than women, young women remain the preferred victims in mystery novels. Edgar Allen Poe famously said, “The death of a beautiful woman is, unquestionably, the most poetical topic in the world,” and the spectacle of female death, evident in the way female bodies are discovered in fiction, usually displayed, sometimes erotically, perpetuates the objectification of women unto death. Employing a tradition of craft that is still viewed by many as separate from fine art, the works are made entirely of cut paper. I borrow from still life and landscape tradition to position the paper “paintings” in the history of art.

Many Mini Murder Scenes:

What accounts for the ongoing appeal of the murder mystery? The murder mystery novel may be an odd choice for escapism, but its enduring popularity might express central societal fascinations. Many Mini Murder Scenes, an installation consisting of series of rooms constructed in miniature is based on crime scenes plucked from fiction. A hybrid of an architectural model and a dollhouse, the domestic interior spaces have in common their appearance in crime fictions as murder scenes. Without the gore or evidence of violence, the scenes are nonetheless imbued with mystery. Embellished with hidden text on the surfaces of walls, floors and furniture, viewers reveal the secrets with the aid of “decoders” in the form of colored films, UV light, and other optical tricks. Using various treatments on the glass, the spaces will appear to change depending on vantage point. For instance, a wall may appear solid from one angle, but it will disappear when viewed from the opposite side of the room, merging two spaces into one. A guidebook issued to each viewer equips him to decode the piece like a crime scene investigator, and the puzzles and activities in the guidebook serve as a souvenir and prolongation of the experience. Rather than solving the crime, visitors investigate the cultural significance of the murder mystery. The viewer’s attention activates the exhibition, and the impact continues long after the visitor leaves.

Catalog Essay written for Many Mini