joseph scissorhands: To Boldly Sew: Textile Art by Alice Kettle

Sunday 3 September 2023

To Boldly Sew: Textile Art by Alice Kettle

Alice Kettle - Three Girls, 2022 (detail).

Alice Kettle is one of my favourite artists, and I am very fortunate to own a couple of her smaller pieces. Originally trained as a fine-art painter, Alice crossed over to the medium of textiles and brought that fine-art sensibility with her to fabric as she draws and paints with the sewing machine and thread into cloth, creating some wonderful works of art in the process. I have avidly followed Alice's progress and development through the years, featuring her work on these pages (here), and (here), when I have attended exhibitions solely devoted to, or that featured her art. The latest such ones happen to be smack bang in the heart of the City of London on Bishopsgate and Fenchurch Street. These exhibitions are mini retrospectives featuring some of the significant, vastly scaled embroideries that Alice has become celebrated for which suit the huge airy corporate spaces in which they are displayed here, as well as other pieces created on a more domestic scale. It is a rare pleasure to be able to experience first-hand the surface textures created by the mark-making of different thicknesses of cotton, metallic threads and wools employed by the artist. As well as the beautiful textures created by the threads, the embroideries are also enhanced by Kettle's skills as a colourist. I believe her work is as strong as any of the leading painters renowned for their sense of colour in this respect as she skilfully overlays patches of differing complementary and clashing colour threads to create areas that appear similar to that on painted canvases. Unsurprisingly with her innovative, instinctive approach to embroidery Kettle has won numerous awards, the latest being the 2023 Brookfield Properties Craft Award, the prize of which are these two displays of amazing figurative work.