Layers of Meaning

Jean Hicks - Three Dimensional Felt

Jean Hicks is a Seattle artist who works in three dimensional felt. For the practical, she makes felt hats. For the visionary, Hicks creates felt renditions of ordinary household objects: phones, chairs, and irons.

At Penland, Hicks began a hat project that melded political philosophy and sculpture into a felted hat. "... The impulse came from her desire to utilize the gesture that wearing a hat entails. "Just putting on a hat signals some intention. The red hats I made at this time are deliberately extreme shapes, because I wanted to give them a spirit of real animation. I wanted them to be about speaking up and speaking out.

"The project," she says, "came out of my emotions about the politics of that moment. In the face of warmongering, hatred and the curtailing of rights, people simply were not speaking up as much as they should."

Invited to participate in a fashion show at the Seattle Arts Festival, Bumbershoot, artists were required to complete the sentence, "Fashion is". Hicks' statement read: "Fashion is Facism: Style is Self-Defense". "...the hats were modeled by women who performed kajukenbo - an eclectic style of kung-fu that blends five distinct traditions."

For the production of Far Away, a play by Caryl Churchill, Hicks created all of the hats and coached the actors on the art of hat making. Image from the play above.

Hicks' work can be seen in person at some of the American Craft Council shows.