American textile artist Sheila Hicks carried around in her everyday life and travels a small wooden frame loom. Serving as a “traveling sketchbook,” her work is often drawn from “commonly comprehensible life experiences.” (I love that phrase!) Her compositions, a visual dialogue, what she calls “intelligent play,” weave through her creations, a life long fascination with thread and cloth, “personal reflections and reactions to a given place.” From her “portable studio” her dynamic, miniature works, sometimes used as maquettes for larger pieces, speak to me beyond texture, pattern, and color.
She said, “The ship Olympic Bravery crashed into the rocks on the edge of the island. The metal gunwale split wide open and opened my eyes to broken surfaces.”
Learn more about the shipwreck: https://www.wrecksite.eu/
Image Credit: https://www.sheilahicks.com/
For Sheila, they are her explorer’s tools into the unknown world of expression and having something to say. She inspires in me to think more deeply about my explorer’s tools as a writer and educator; my grid journal, index cards (I use these to write down passages, research entries), pencils and the sharpener I bought at the Peggy Guggenheim Museum on my memorable trip to Venice. And yes, the blank page to develop content, my personal handwriting, my “something to say” about the engagement with the visual expression. What can the visual world inspire in my writings; what “commonly comprehensible” truths will surface?