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a workshop in Chile devoted to stimulating the production of handcraft. The Taller Artesanal was formed as a cooperative. It is a remote village in Huaquen on the coast in central Chile. In this mountainous region where wool and hides are a natural resource, Sheila [[strikethrough]] 's family [[/strikethrough]] Hick's "family" joined with 24 others in a program sponsored by the Fundación Artur Matte. The families had always lived within the splendid isolation of Huaquen. Some of them worked at home, some in the school and workshops. [[strikethrough]] Sheila [[/strikethrough]] Hicks directed the production of rugs and hangings utilizing alpaca and wet=spun linen and pointed the direction toward a continuing project [[strikethrough]] which [[/strikethrough]] that provides for economic and aesthetic growth of this cooperative workshop.

In 1970 she was invited to Morocco to help revitalize [[strikethrough]] their [[/strikethrough]] a strongly traditional rug industry. After traveling throughout the country, she chose workshops in Rabat and Tangiers to start her series of Moroccan prayer rugs. Here she executes the first rug and then the women weavers use their basic skills and familiar wool to create her radical (to them) designs (p.  ).

The Moroccan series has a density [[strikethrough]] which [[/strikethrough]] that relates to the heaviness of the architectural details [[strikethrough]] which [[/strikethrough]] that inspired them -- doorways, tunnels, portals, the rounded household arch, the pointed Moslem arch. Sometimes the differences in pile depth of a single piece recall the stalactite detail in architecture made up of successive layers of plaster. Like the "Moroccan forms which flatter the eye with proportions and symmetry which appease the spirit," the Prayer Rugs transcend convention and iconography: in spite of their ordered quiescence they have magic, mystery, and metaphor.

Sheila Hicks works out of her Atelier des Grands Augustins in Paris, and moves from continent to continent, giving demonstrations (Edinburgh, 1970; [[strikethrough]] L.A. [[/strikethrough]] Los Angeles 1971), spontaneously making a happening in what she calls