Explore Artist Candace Hicks’ Unique Embroidery at Ivester Contemporary

When artist Candace Hicks was 19 years old, she worked at a Blockbuster and had a tall, male manager. 

“He was using a fake ID, and he shared with me — I think only with me — that he was only 15, and that he had gigantism,” Hicks says. “Ultimately, he disappeared without a trace, and I never heard from him again.” 

Hicks took this true story and embroidered it into a quilt, then added a twist ending to subsequent quilts, all of which are currently on view at the Ivester Contemporary through February 22 in Hicks’ show, “The Story I Tell at Parties.” 

Exploring the nature of storytelling

“I’m really curious about how that happens with the retelling of stories, how they can actually alter your memory and your recall,” Hicks says. “So rather than trying to track down the people involved or investigate it, I just decided to look to fiction to think of, well, what would be a good ending to this story, or the most exciting plot?”

Hicks is drawn to the strange, and her creations map out her explorations of the uncanny. Other works at her current exhibition show some of the rabbit holes she’s followed about Americans’ obsession with conspiracy theories. A series of embroideries on canvas show charts of the popularity of search terms via Google Books Ngram Viewer, including “pizzagate,” “secret police,” “Area 51,” and “UAP,” or Unidentified Aerial Phenomena, a term that was once again on people’s minds after the much-discussed 2023 House Oversight committee’s public hearing on the matter.

“When I would hear these words, I wondered when people really started using this word, when it took off, and just asking myself, How long have we been talking about black helicopters as a culture, or chemtrails, or some of these things that are longstanding conspiracy theories?” Hicks says. “So by creating these little charts and graphs, you have this visual pattern looking at the comparison of these terms, how we use them, and the frequency with which we use them.” 

Stitching stories into art

Hicks’ work often captures eerie moments in time, drawn from both personal experiences and collective memory, resembling plotlines from “The X-Files”—stranger than fiction.

Hicks’ work at Ivester Contemporary in 2022 included a series of embroidered notebooks, “Common Threads,” designed to be picked up and read, offering a tactile experience. Each work resembles the standard composition notebook many of us remember from elementary school days, with several “pages” detailing a moment of profound coincidence in Hicks’ life — every margin and line and word painstakingly embroidered — connecting words and themes gathered from literature, conversations, and experiences. They feel like an intersection between a secret journal and a sci-fi novel.

Before Hicks began working on “Common Threads,” she was working as a secretary in a bail bond office and had a lot of downtime, so she took breaks at the nearby library and read a lot. She started fooling around with embroidery at her desk, making notebooks and recording coincidences.

Weaving history and personal narrative

“I remember reading a David Sedaris book that had the phrase ‘antique dental instruments’ in it, and the next book that I read had the same phrase,” she says. “It was a science fiction novel by William Gibson, and I was just delighted. Coincidence makes you feel really weird in a good, undefined way, like very few things in life. The pleasure that you get from them is not really tied to any of your senses. It’s just like a buzzing in your brain or a kind of stimulation.”

In the decade-plus since Hicks began following her delights, she’s taught design at Stephen F. Austin State University in Nacogdoches, Texas, exhibited her embroidery work around the country, and is currently spending seven months as a Fulbright Scholar in the Hauts-de-France region of northern France — the same area her 22-year-old son was born in. She is personally excited to return to a place she spent her early twenties in and reflect and build on that youthful experience. But artistically, her purpose will veer away from the whimsical to the consequential.

She will be working with a museum to help preserve the history of printing textiles as well as studying the Bayeux Tapestry in Normandy, a large-scale embroidery work created in the 11th century. But she’ll also be tackling an entirely new kind of artistic project that looms large as a new administration takes power in the US: telling others’ personal stories about reproductive healthcare.

From crop circles to reproductive care

“I’ve been hearing so many personal stories about some of the very fraught experiences that families have had recently with the new legislation post-Roe,” Hicks says.

“For example, a friend of mine was telling me that she had had a horrible experience with IUD insertion, and she discovered that a lot of her friends had had similarly bad experiences, and that they didn’t feel like this was communicated to them well by medical personnel. So the idea of sharing stories seems very powerful, especially as that relates to policy and medical research, but also just to the sense that people feel heard and cared for. So it will be this really kind of quick shift to go from thinking about Blockbuster and UFOs and disclaimers and conspiracy theories into thinking about this more urgent issue.”

Even so, Hicks won’t leave her eccentric roots behind entirely. In the past, she has heavily researched and even created work incorporating crop circles. She showcased a 40-foot mural in Salina, Kansas, featuring peepholes into dioramas—one of which housed a bathroom with a bath mat decorated with a crop circle. She also hopes to walk through a crop circle herself, whether they are made by humans or aliens.

“I’ve thought about the pretty quick train ride to get to rural England, because there are several counties that are really well known for their crop circles, beginning in the early summer,” Hicks says. “So I’m closer than ever before to finding out about a crop circle and being able to get to it.”

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