Art, Georgia O’Keeffe believed, springs from “the desire to make the unknown known… and keeping the unknown always beyond you.” We seem to have drifted lightyears away from that motive force, the majority of our epoch’s cultural production aiming to render the market maximally known — its profitably proven preferences, its self-interests, its moral fashions — in order to cater the creation to it, to virtue-signal enough to go viral.

In every era, there are those who do what they do from a place of exuberant creative vitality unconcerned with validation, those who refuse to mistake the conditions of their culture for givens and choose to make what they want to see exist — the singular, the untested, the unexampled — for the world to take or leave. The price is often profound loneliness, the reward profound peace.

Sheila Hicks is a living emblem of that defiant, wildly countercultural courage to create rather than cater.

For the better part of a century — since before the splitting of the atom, before the signing of the Civil Rights Act, before the invention of laser and duct-tape and the Internet — she has been making koans out of fiber, material poems that reach something beyond meaning, something that, like nature’s needless beauty, simply is. Although her work has been exhibited in every major museum and she has been profiled by every major magazine, the recognition hover like an afterthought, agreeable and irrelevant as a stranger’s perfume, over her tactile universe of feeling.

At ninety-two, Hicks opens the door to her life and work — which are so clearly one — in a feisty Time Sensitive conversation, in which she keeps pushing back against being classified as an artist. With an eye to how labels and categories invariably commodify what they contain, reducing process to product, she reflects:

I don’t even think about art. People want to pull me into the art thing all the time… Is this art or isn’t this art… What is art? I think people do what they feel like doing, and not authenticating things. These podcasts and these interviews and this reportage and these exhibitions, a lot of it has to do with trying to authenticate things, validate things. Here in Paris, we have a hundred exhibitions opening every week. What are we validating? And if you’re not validated and if you’re not being exhibited, what are you doing? Are you wasting your time or are you just simply doing what you feel like doing and that you like doing?

It is a sentiment not dissimilar to what legendary cellist Pablo Casals, at ninety-three, articulated about the secret of creative vitality and what Rachel Carson advised an spiring writer: “If you write what you yourself sincerely think and feel and are interested in, the chances are very high that you will interest other people as well.”

Holding up a large baton completely covered in an intricate pattern of colorful fabric and thread, Hicks adds:

When I made this, I didn’t make it with any intention that it’s supposed to be craft or art or design or decoration. Or what is it? It just is. Take it or leave it.

Complement with some abiding advice on being an artist from Bowie, Beethoven, and M.C. Richards, then revisit Virginia Woolf’s classic existential epiphany about what it means to create.

For of Hicks, watch her singular spirit come abloom in this tender short film: