Candace Hicks has been making books for over twenty years. Her interest in the book form stemmed from a love of reading fiction. Hicks’ ongoing project, Common Threads, turned her into an accidental embroiderer. Embroidery materials are readily available, the method is popular, and the act is connected to women and femininity. The history of embroidery is full of instances of political engagement, resistance to oppression, and the preservation of suppressed narratives. The tactility of a fabric book is often associated with young children, but the haptic sense is something we never grow out of.
Hicks hopes to induce people to want to touch her work and think of the experience of reading as a physical act. Common Threads are collections of the coincidences that occur when she’s reading. Whenever she sees the same word or phrase in two books back-to-back, Hicks makes a note of it. We are all familiar with these occurrences, but Hicks uses them as a tool for commenting on culture. The notebook is so ubiquitous, and yet she hopes to provide a new way of looking and thinking about memory. Notes for String Theory, hand-embroidered pages, confront the existential possibilities of the blank page. The size, format, and color palette of notebook paper 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.
Thinking about writer’s block, Hicks began drawing versions of a blank sheet of paper in blue thread onto canvas. Where she had previously embroidered the text and illustrations of her artist’s books, Hicks 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, she has named her humble drawings for the theoretical framework uniting all matter and forces at play in the universe. “Embroider” is a synonym of “embellish,” but Hicks subverts this decorative expectation by preserving clean, graphic lines. Join Candace Hicks as she dives deeper into her unfolding journey with needle and thread.
Date
Thursday, September 25, 2025
Time
5 pm – 6:30 pm ET
Location
Zoom, a link will be sent to participants the week before the lecture
Cost
Tickets for this event are sold on a sliding scale with a suggested donation of $25, but if you wish to pay less or more than the suggested donation, you may select a different amount from the drop down menu. As always, we are grateful for your support, which ensures the continuation and preservation of textile knowledge. Thank you for making this series possible.
Tatter Library is a registered 501(c)3. Our speaker series is part of our community programming and proceeds support the continued success of our talks with artists, scholars, and historians we admire. For this event, all ticket proceeds will go towards keeping this series alive.
Recording
This lecture will be recorded. A link to the recording will be emailed to all those who register following the live session. This link is live for one month for you to watch at your convenience.
Our Lecturer
Candace Hicks collects coincidences from the books she reads in her artists’ books and installations. With the exhibition Read Me at Lawndale Art Center, Hicks opened the book form into a room-sized interactive installation in which viewers pieced together a puzzle of narrative to find the correct solution. The Locked Room at Living Arts in Tulsa focused on a specific genre of literature, the “locked room” mystery, and visitors were tasked with the challenge to find the means of metaphorically escaping the gallery. For Many Mini Murder Scenes at Women and Their Work, Hicks reproduced tableaux plucked from crime fiction and offered viewers the experience of playing a detective searching for clues. Her most recent exhibition at Ivester Contemporary, The Story I Tell at Parties, probes the reliability of memory as she recalls her first job under the unlikely supervision of a 15-year-old boss with gigantism who vanished without explanation. Her work consists of artist’s books, installation, printmaking and drawing. Books from her Common Threads series are in more than 80 collections around the world including, Museum of Fine Arts Houston, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Boston Athenaeum, Deutsche Nationalbibliothek, Grolier Club, Harvard, Hungarian Multicultural Center, MIT, MoMA, Museum of Applied Arts, Vienna, UCLA Biomedical Library, Stanford, and Yale.