Alice Kettle

Alice Kettle is a contemporary textile/fibre artist based in the UK. She has established a unique area of practice by her use of a craft. She has extended the possibilities of machine embroidery: producing works the size of tapestries, exploiting the textures and effects made possible through the harnessing of a mechanical process to intuitive and creative ends. My work evokes moments in our lives. It is of people and glimpses of stories which mark themes in our very existence. Some are reminiscent works which reference mythology and story telling, using the line of thread to connect relationships and define emotions such as suffering, hope and renewal. The figures which inhabit the work explore relationships, as do the threads, one placed next to or on top of another. The fabric and the image held together by stitch, express the emotional connection, the sense of touch, texture, and feelings, those emotive sensations which textiles provoke and express within their fabric. Changes in direction in the hatching and stitching add to the relationship with light touching and settling on the surface.

In covering areas of fabric right to the edge there is a slow building up of back and forward free embroidery, the visual evidence of the repetitive movement of the machine stitch. The stitched background is drawn on the fabric; the tension in the thread pulls and distorts. My head is full of pictures, sensations and stories forming and worked into its material. The threads are various in gauge and type, sometimes thick and reflective otherwise matt and fine. Those that are thicker are rolled around the bobbin and the fabric worked upside down, often with the threads loosened to tuft and loop. The stitching is often drawn blind from the back and the vastness of fabric bunched in the arm of the machine. For me this is a liberating act of drawing an unseen image in reverse and subsequently responding. It is a process that can change and be reconstructed and grow, so that the piece is often stitched over, cut up, patched and stitched again. Various machines give variety of line and form.

It is also a process which reveals the sense of self and identity. This work portrays emotional fragmentation, the revealing of the inner self and the subsequent reconstruction of persona. The face becomes a mask, contorting and covering and joining the disparate parts to face the outside world. The thread makes physical and metaphorical connections between the touching, sensory quality of textile and the expression of feelings.

WhITworth LINKS shows how the works in TACTILE link to the Whitworths collections that are either on current display or on the Whitworths online collections database. Search the online collections database and find other related works by using the following words: portrait, tapestry, mythology Access the online collections by going to: http://www.whitworth.manchester.ac.uk/collection

Alice Kettle

Edgar Degas Study of four dancers Charcoal with coloured pastel on paper

Alice Kettle, Three Caryatids 1988-89 Machine Embroidery

Henry Moore Reclining figure Screen-printed linen