In a recent interview, Isabella Ducrot, a 95-year-old Italian artist whose paper and textile explorations have become widely admired, cheerfully acknowledges that she does not have a future. Rather she has a present. This is how she measures her life. This is where she finds happiness.

Sheila Hicks, 92, a renowned textile artist, embraces her own present in the same way. In sharing their practice, they both speak of those moments of discovery and the joy they daily encounter because of the journey they are taking within them.

While cultural depictions often render the elderly as incidental and burdensome, the words of creators like Hicks and Ducrot reimagine and redefine agedness.

Hicks characterizes the medium in which she works as a way of bringing “softness” into a world that is hard. Ducrot reveals how she amuses herself “madly” within the realm of “surprise,” that mysterious space often called the liminal or the in-between where she dwells as an artist.