Common Threads is a series of hand-embroidered unique canvas books which copy the form and design of dime-store “composition” books.  The books themselves, self-consciously hand-made objects, are a record of coincidental occurrences generally gleaned from reading or mundane events.  The use of embroidery thread allows for the production of the text and image with the same mark and material, to make the text, image, and substance of the book inseparable.

V.134, 2020. Books, How Much of These Hills is Gold and This Land is Our Land: An Immigrants Manifesto are noted in this volume. Also, buildings with missing walls, dioramas, and zombies are discussed in short stories by Charles Yu and Errol Morris’ Believing is Seeing: Observations on the Mysteries of Photography. Also discussed are staged photographs in relation to Trump’s war room.

ARTIST’S STATEMENT—Storytelling is key to Candace Hicks’ artistic practice. There is an implied narrative in everything, even, as Hicks addresses with her work, in the seemingly pointless mental wheel-spinning that is a part of daily life.  Her work acknowledges the unavoidability of simulation and the impossibility of originality.  Her choice of the book as a principle medium is due to the phenomenon of the book as authoritative.  Books provide an arena in which fiction can be accepted as fact and observations can take on a mythic narrative quality.  Her interest in books also stems from their inherent unity of text and image, which lends books continued relevance as a transmedia hybrid.