Hand-sewn embroidery on 6 cotton pages, #97 in an unlimited series of 134 (and counting) unique artists’ books.

Common Threads Volume 97, has a stark and lovely tree-filled cover and really loses you in the coincidental woods. It contains references to counting crows, scrabble, dictionary writers, and ruminations on semiotics and linguistic philosophy, a favorite discourse of Hicks. The coincidental manifestations occur in two ‘sit coms’ Winter and Everything Under, and a real-life visit to Santa Fe. A tangential reference to Samuel Johnson brings in the classics which Hicks like to re-contextualize within the mundanity of contemporary life.

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.

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.

PDF Colophon