Installation view of “The Story I Tell at Parties”
For artist Candace Hicks, storytelling is just as much verbal as it is tactile and visual. Her latest exhibition at Austin’s Ivester Contemporary, The Story I Tell at Parties, is a surrealist exploration of the reliability of memory and the stories we share, woven and unraveled across embroidered panels of fabric. The show features work from her ongoing series, Notes for String Theory, where hand-embroidered pages mimic school composition notebooks with familiar yet warped versions of blank pages that symbolize Hicks’ own writer’s block during the pandemic. Another series incorporates disclaimers and linguistic trends through Google Ngrams. Finally, there are three large quilts, each embroidered with fading accuracy of one of Hicks’ most unique stories told at parties.
Candace Hicks, “Flat Earth,” 2024, embroidery on canvas, 10.50 x 8 inches
“Making art about literature is the number one theme that runs through my work,” she says. Hicks, who is the coordinator of Foundations at Stephen F. Austin State University, earned a Master’s in Fine Arts in printmaking from Texas Christian University, where she began making cloth artist books. “Reading is a very tactile activity, and I wanted to recreate that softness,” she says. As she began to look into the tradition of cloth books, she was intrigued by creating books about coincidences. Now 20 years in and a 150 volumes later, her books have been collected by universities, rare book collectors, and museums such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Museum of Modern Art.
Candace Hicks, “Clitoris,” 2024, embroidery on canvas, 10.50 x 8 inches
In her Ngram series, Google search histories showcase trends over the years of certain words, including “red pill,” “mansplain,” “feminist,” “Karen,” and “vaccine,” words that not only have shaped our language over the last few years but politics as well.
Candace Hicks, “Vaccine,” 2024, embroidery on canvas, 10.50 x 8 inches
The three quilts, titled Ron, I Think, The Sixth Sense, and Y2K, were Hicks’ way of taking “advantage of all the things that call to mind domesticity and comfort — the perfect metaphor to tell this story,” she says.
Candace Hicks, “Ron, I Think,” 2024, embroidery on canvas, 93 x 55 inches
In Ron, I Think, she recalls a memory from when she was 19 and working at Blockbuster. “Every time I attend a social gathering and people are telling outlandish stories, I wait impatiently to tell the story of my manager at Blockbuster. I’ve told it so many times that even I can’t be sure how much of it is true,” she writes on the quilt.
The story unfolds: One day, her manager, Ron, confided in her that he was actually 15, had run away from home and that his large stature — “broad-shouldered with a heavy brow and a resonating Hulk voice” — was due to gigantism. Ron was later fired for stealing, and Hicks never saw him again.
Candace Hicks, “Y2K,” 2024, embroidery on canvas, 93 x 55 inches
The quilt, Y2K, is the least factual. “At the time, I was sleepwalking a lot,” Hicks says, which likely distorted her sense of what was a dream and what was reality. In the quilt, she remembers reading Lolita for a book club where no one read the book. “They claimed the subject matter put them off of it, but in my experience, no one ever reads the book in a book club,” it reads. “I had an annotated copy, and I loved getting lost in the footnotes.” In a confusing coincidence, Hicks turned on the made-for-TV movie, unaware Lolita had been made into a film. It was a moment of wacky déjà vu, something she also depicts in the quilt.
Candace Hicks, “The Sixth Sense,” 2024, embroidery on canvas, 93 x 55 inches
Hicks’ next project, which she is currently working on as a Fulbright Scholar in Amiens, France, a city with a rich textile history dating back to the Middle Ages, focuses on sharing personal narratives of reproductive healthcare. Utilizing embroidery to preserve these handwritten stories, she feels it’s the “perfect media to directly advocate for women’s rights,” she says. “As an artist that uses embroidery, I have received a lot of unearned credit for political activism, but with each new project, I seek opportunities to support and engage with my community,” she says.
The Story I Tell at Parties is on view at Ivester Contemporary through February 22.
