Dominique Corlett speaks to the award-winning textile artist about a life dedicated to stitch and the joys of sewing backwards
HEIRLOOMS OF THE FUTURE
On first encountering the colourful, often enormous artworks of Alice Kettle, one would be forgiven for mistaking them for paintings. From a distance, her shimmering, abstract figures, set against the brightest backgrounds of electric blue, sunshine yellow and hot coral and pink, appear to be drawn with the dynamic lines and marks of the brush stroke. But a closer look reveals that it is not paint that is bringing these canvases – sometimes as large as eight metres by three metres – to life, but rather stitches of thread. Alice Kettle is a textile artist who, in place of the painter’s brush, uses a sewing machine to produce her exuberant and often poignant artworks.
Professor of Textile Arts at Manchester School of Art, Manchester Metropolitan University, Alice has been working in free machine embroidery and championing the power of stitch since the late 1980s. As well as making her own work (represented by the Candida Stevens Gallery), she leads the design and craft research group at Manchester and, down the years, has been involved in numerous public and community projects, which she is hugely passionate about. For her latest, the Thread Bearing Witness project, first shown at the Whitworth in 2018, she worked with refugees to create three enormous embroidered panels – Ground, Sea and Sky – each one representing their experiences of migration and displacement.
In March, Alice received the highest accolade when she won the Brookfield Properties Craft Award at the Crafts Council’s annual Collect Fair for her contribution to craft. The prize means that three of her pieces will be purchased for the Crafts Council’s permanent collection, and exhibitions of her work will be held in London this summer.
Alice is still digesting this exciting news when H&A caught up with her at her home studio in Frome.
‘I’m very proud, if I’m honest,’ says Alice, when asked how she feels about her win, adding that she expected she might be ‘a bit too old’ for it. Fortunately, age prejudice didn’t influence the judges’ decision, who praised how she has ‘continuou
