String Theory is a unique book from Hicks’ Common Threads series – a variant series of hand-embroidered canvas books, copying the form and design of dime-store “composition” books. The books themselves, self-consciously hand-made objects, are a record of coincidental occurrences generally gleaned from reading or mundane events. The use of embroidery thread allows for the production of both the text and image with the same mark and material, rendering the text, image and substance of the book inseparable.

String Theory was catalyzed by the artist’s search for a grand unifying theory that would explain the coincidental phenomena that the artist has observed and documented in the last decade of her creative work. The supreme coherence evinced by String Theory is cultivated through the masterful unification of subject matter, composition, and form.

Storytelling is key to Hicks’ artistic practice. There is an implied narrative in everything, even, as Hicks addresses with her work, in the seemingly pointless mental-wheel-spinning that is a part of daily life. Her work acknowledges the unavoidability of simulation and the impossibility of originality. Her choice of the book as a principle medium stems from the idea of books as authoritative; they provide an arena in which fiction can be accepted as fact and observations can take on a mythic narrative quality. Her interest in books also derives from their inherent unity of text and image, which lends books continued relevance as a transmedia hybrid.