In 1957, Sheila Hicks received a Fulbright fellowship to paint in Chile. But once there, she told Frieze magazine in 2020, “I began teaching myself how to weave because I was interested in how the pre-Incas structured thought with threads, with lines. The more I got into it, the more I realized how sophisticated these weavings were; more intriguing, in fact, than what we were learning in the Bauhaus programme.” One year later, Hicks left South America with a passion for fiber arts that would transform her practice. With loans from international and private collections, The Hepworth Wakefield showcases 70 pieces of Hicks’s groundbreaking work. —Sophie Kemp