What a wonderful lecture! Alice Kettle spoke about her slant on her own and others' work, considering the transformative power of thread.
Alice Kettle's work is largely figurative, and is heavily influenced by classical legends - Theseus and Ariadne; Odysseus and Helen; and the 3 Caryatids. She is very interested in how lines are used, and recommended the book "Lines: a brief history" by Tim Ingold. She referred to Picasso and how he used the 2D line, as an abstracted line. Klee investigated where line could take him "taking a line for a walk". Her stitched line is gestural, and therefore unpredictable. She wants to expand/challenge the nature of the line. Thread has a beginning and an end, a tensile nature. Stitchers can change the nature of the line by varying the route through.
Kettle trained as a painter and now uses thread to express her and her world. She sees it as two threads in conversation (as she is a machine embroiderer), affecting light, surface and 3D quality in pictorial and descriptive form. Machine embroidery allows the voice of thread, and facilitates a vocabulary of mark making. She works from both the back and front, varying the weight of the thread, the speed of fabric movement. She likens this to emulating the speed and movement of a pencil. She changes, reworks and reconstructs as she goes. Her work is about storytelling in a textile format. It is not flat on the wall or rigidly stretched on a frame. It floats against a wall, with ripples in the surface and uneven edges. This is the richness of life. She likes working big. Rhythmic repeated movement. Her style gives an unpredictable outcome. She works over mistakes. Mistakes are part of the uniqueness of layering and embroidery.
Much of Kettle's work goes to galleries. Commissions taken are usually site specific. Her latest piece for Winchester Cathedral was for a crypt that already had an ancient icon of Christ painted on the wall, so needed to be a soft, sensitive complement to the primary work of Christ already present. She also has recent work at the Scottish High Court. Staging this was considered, as she had been warned disgrunted people would walk past it as they left, so her embroidery is too high for anyone to set fire to it using a lighter. She has work in the Australian National Library which was inspired by the landscape.
Kettle's commission for Winchester Cathedral was "Looking forward to the past". This was created by working in public in an open Gallery. She was very nervous about revealing her working processes in public, and was astonished how supportive the general public were. She had so many dinner invitations that she ended up playing music to be able to work uninterrupted. This led to her having musicians offering free tapes of themselves playing, as publicity for them! The commission was to portray the history of the City of Winchester, but not in a chronological format. So she put together a patchwork of history to represent the city the way it is - history embedded, with ancient and modern all mixed up like the architecture of the city. It ended up being the biggest machine embroidery in the world, although she only had one year to complete the commission. She felt lost in the volume of work, but feels she stitched herself back together. Opened herself to possibilities and liberated herself by accepting the reconstructed roughness. Discovered the expanding line.
Considers machine embroidery like a heartbeat or a clock. Sees herself and her 3 daughters like the 4 seasons, each born in a different season.
Kettle has a fascination with hands. She has done a series of work about gloves. She likes the simplicity of gesture and line, and the indication of the hand of the maker. She has encompassed a shift in technology, and enjoys the consideration of where these changes take the maker. She is exploring digital stitch to interpret the expressive line. Digital technology is now amazing. She wants to develop digital technology from its function as accelerating production techniques to enabling expression. Therefore she uses digital technology to interpret hand drawing. She works with a Nottingham company using their specialist digital embroidery machines, and pushes the techniques, but is restricted by being wary about messing up their expensive kit. She wants to challenge best digital machine practice, but they are not her machines to experiment upon.
Currently, digital technology is used to repeat a motif well. She wants to use it so there is no repeated stitch. Currently people get trapped by the machine. She wants to get back to the nature of the thread, rather than the nature of the machine.
Kettle has done various collaborative projects. With CJ O'Neill she did a picnic set work. With Alex McErlain they did drawings in digital into fabrics. With Pushpa Kumari they used sari thread to draw a library of patterns. She also did the Sail and flags for the Olympiad Boat Project, which is now displayed at the Margate Turner Contemporary Gallery.
This was an absolutely wonderful lecture. It is interesting how different attendees use the information. The people on the V&A course, are largely older ladies, with a traditional approach to embroidery and tapestry, who appear to sit and listen, and enjoy, although some take detailed notes. Some of the younger ones like me, appear to be more interested in where embroidery is going, and take detailed notes of artist names, and use them to do artist research and take it further themselves. There are many right ways of using such a course as run by the V&A.
