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In Europe, during an exhibition at the Kunstgewerbemuseum in Zurich, she was engaged by a rug manufacturer, Arterior Textile GmbH, who invited her to produce a series for this company. Here she developed the technique of combining the braided and wrapped pile with [[strikethrough]] looping [[/strikethrough]] tufting by electric pistol. It is not surprising to note here that [[strikethrough]] Sheila [[/strikethrough]] Hicks was the artist to welcome and respond to this tool. Unafraid of machine techniques, stretching her inventiveness to supplement the flat formal format of her earlier work, her ingenuity produced an idiom to serve her purpose. The Red Prayer Rug (p.   ) is one of a series in this technique. Others are in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art, New York; the [[strikethrough]] Columbia Broadcasting System [[/strikethrough]]. This series was all made of abundantly hirsute cascades of tassled wool. They were never meant to hug the wall but to gush forth, to spring freely from the wall.

Claude Levi-Strauss, the eminent French scholar, anthropologist, and philosopher writes of [[strikethrough]] her [[/strikethrough]] Hicks' work,  "Her wall hangings have the living warmth and the thickness of fleece; their complex structure and their shadows seem to chisel out perspectives attributable only to dream palaces; they offer the mellow depth, radiance, and mystery of the starry sky.

"Nothing better than this art could provide altogether the adornment and the antidote for the functional, utilitarian architecture in which we are sentenced to dwell. It enlivens it with the dense, patient work of human hands, and the inventive charm of a creative mind constantly stimulated by experiencing the gamut of those new materials which modern industry supplies, while remaining faithful to the immemorial rules of the most ancient perhaps of

Transcription Notes:
Removed paragraph symbol as they are not required per instructions, so to whoever keeps putting them in--PLEASE READ THE INSTRUCTIONS.