Sheila Hicks: Monumental Fibre Works and the Legacy of Andean Weaving

Sheila Hicks’s new exhibition uses intriguing ponytail installations and Andean-influenced weavings to yet again seize your imagination

Atelier Martine Aublet within the Musée du quai Branly, Paris, has a tale to tell.

It begins at the entrance to the exhibition ‘Le Fil Voyageur’ (A Travelling Thread) with Sheila Hicks‘s Fugue (1969-70). This monumental textile invites visitors to a tête-à-tête between classical (8000 BCE-13th century) Andean weavings from the museum’s South America collection and modern and contemporary works by Hicks.

The exhibition

Hicks’s longstanding friend and writer Monique Lévi-Strauss provides words that guide visitors through this colloque intime.

Hicks explained to the exhibition’s curator, Isaline Saunier, how Fugue’s wave-like form would arrest attention. Water as a theme recurs throughout Hicks’s almost seventy-year-long study and re-imagination of indigenous weaving techniques. Built with linen and blue silk-wrapped ropes (‘ponytails,’ says Hicks), the verticality of the work references the reed-like totora plant used to build Andean fishing boats, while its blue palette also references 6,000-year-old indigo-dyed textiles discovered in Huaca Prieta, Peru.

The exhibition includes Hicks’s Plegaria (1960) from her small scale Minimes series. Created throughout her career, Minimes are a ‘guide,’ she says, to find ‘my voice and my footing.’

They began as aide-mémoire after her observation of ancient Andean weaving practices in South America during her Fulbright Scholarship (195758) when she was a twenty-three-year-old university student.

The meaning behind the art

In conversation with Lévi-Strauss in 2004, Hicks described how she wants her works to ‘startle and capture your imagination.’

Hicks described her monumental ponytail works to Lévi-Strauss as being more ‘masses of fibre than textile,’ which raises the question whether the whole for Hicks exists as something besides its parts.

Her ponytail works succeed in startling. They may hang in columns in one exhibition, while in another the same bundles might pile on the floor. In this exhibition a ponytail work cascades from a wall and puddles on the floor.

Andean textiles

Elsewhere in the exhibition, Hicks’s small four-selvedge weaves reflect her discovery of Andean backstrap ‘body tension’ looms where one end of the loom is staked to the ground and the other is belted around the weaver’s waist. Hicks made her own backstrap loom to weave four-selvedge textiles.

Andean textiles (with rare exceptions) were always woven with four sides of selvedge – a finished edge that won’t fray. This required the weaver to know the textile’s end use as, uniquely to Andean weavers, they did not weave two-sided selvedge cloth meant to be cut.

Water reappears in Hicks’s Fishing in the Well (2025). The title of the suspended, fibre-wrapped cast-iron disc (a pulley wheel from a well?) perhaps suggests a winding down for the ninety one-year-old artist.

Still engaged and productive, Hicks has gained sufficient prominence in the art world that she can take time to reflect and enjoy calm waters.

Be sure to not miss Hicks’s triumphant exhibition, running until 8 March 2026.