Notes on Cloud Formation

OCTOBER 9–NOVEMBER 5, 2026
CANDACE HICKS

Hicks takes embroidery’s double meaning of “embellishment” as a starting point to approach storytelling as an artform susceptible to exaggeration. Her series of narrative patchwork quilts, The Story I Tell at Parties, are essentially self-publication painstakingly rendered by hand in thread. Probing the reliability of memory, she recalls her first job under the unlikely supervision of a 15-year-old boss with gigantism who vanished without explanation.

Notes for String Theory are hand-embroideries that confront the existential possibilities of the blank page. The size, format and color palette of notebook paper, they are familiar and warped at the same time. From across the room, they appear as flat, linear designs, but upon closer inspection reveal themselves to be delicately textured. 

Hicks’ work has taken literature as its subject for many years, and writing has been central to her artistic practice. She discovered the potential of the blank page as generative when she was experiencing writer’s block. When the stories and commentary that had previously poured out of her ceased, she began drawing versions of a blank sheet of paper in blue thread onto canvas. Where she had previously embroidered the text and illustrations of her artist’s books, she created a void. Not the first or last to confront the dread of the blank page or to bend writer’s block into subject matter, Hicks has named these humble drawings for the theoretical framework uniting all matter and forces at play in the universe. 

ARTIST BIO

Interdisciplinary artist Candace Hicks collects coincidences from the books she reads and gathers them in her artist’s books and installations. Books from her Common Threads series are in more than 90 collections around the world, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Museum of Fine Art Houston, Boston Athenaeum, Deutsche Nationalbibliothek, Grolier Club, Harvard, Hungarian Multicultural Center, MIT, MoMA NY, Stanford and Yale. She is an associate professor at Stephen F. Austin State University, where she teaches foundations. In 2025, she completed a Fulbright US Scholar project in France, and in 2027 she will represent the state of Texas at the National Women’s Museum in an exhibition devoted to expanded artist’s books. 

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