Alice Kettle: Balancing Act

Alice Kettle uses thread to describe the tensions between stability and precarity; articulating the contradictions between what is fixed and what is in flux. Through stitched and layered surfaces, her works materialise everyday human sensations, interweaving the archetypal and personal with contemporary experience. As Anni Albers observed, “to make life visible and tangible, we need light and material…”

Through the connection between one thread with another, Kettle explores the relationship between catastrophe and hope. “We are part of the material world as physical and emotional beings, …where in between suffering and joy, power and powerlessness, we search for equilibrium.”

Within this new body of textiles, figures appear in the act of catching and throwing, of pushing and pulling. The threads in places are taut, tangled, and drifting, at times grounded and at others lifted—twisted with one another in lines of colour and form. They act as a metaphor for stillness and movement and the continual negotiation between opposing forces. In this dynamic interplay of thread, Kettle explores lived experience where rupture and renewal are in a perpetual balancing act.

An essay Interwoven Worlds: Alice Kettle and the Poetics of Embroidery written by TF Chan accompanies the exhibition. Click the link below to download.