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When she first started exhibiting, some critics dismissed Hicks’s creations – along with many of the other women who work with fibre – as ‘craft’, which was considered somehow lesser than ‘art’. I asked her what she thought of this. Unsurprisingly, she was bored with the question. ‘I care less and less,’ she said, ‘about what definitions people give to my work, whether it’s art or not. I keep probing ideas and fumble to give them form. Everyone has a relationship to material. The interesting question is: how sensitive are they to it?’ She paused and said: ‘I tend to compose fables with coloured and textured lines and work out en route what to do with them or how to interpret them. Fibre is my alphabet and helpmeet.’

“The roof of this wretched life, of which you say so many hard things, will burst open, and all of us, shoulder to shoulder, will ascend into the lofty realm of freedom. And if we should not achieve that final consummation, if things should become worse than before, if the whole truth should be more insupportable than the half-truth, if it should be proved that the silent are in the right as the guardians of existence, if the faint hope that we still possess should give way to complete hopelessness, the attempt is still worth the trial, since you do not desire to live as you are compelled to live.”