Alice Kettle

Alice Kettle: The Garden of England 

The exhibition of The Garden of England will take place at the Queen’s House, Royal Museums Greenwich,  14 March – 18 August 2013

A series of three new works by Alice Kettle, The Garden of England draws on the fine 17th-century portraits collection of the National Maritime Museum.  It celebrates the queens and courtiers of the Queen’s House at Greenwich, its original setting as a garden retreat, and captures the richness and flamboyance of the Stuart court.

This is the inaugural project of the new Royal Museums Greenwich contemporary arts programme.

review

Participants: Arlington Conservation, David Clarke, Leo Fitzmaurice, Fixperts, Alice Kettle,
Laura McGrath, Jasleen Kaur, Park View Motors, Gord Peteran, Steven Probert, Roland Roos, Bernhard Schobinger, Hans Stofer, Jasmina Vuckovic, Lisa Walker, Max Warren.

14 Fe b r u a r y – 2 4 Ma r ch 2 013

Gallery S O London
92 Brick Lane London E1 6RL www.galleryso.com
+44 (0)20 7377 8008 Wed – Sat 12 – 6 Sun 12 – 5
or by appointment Aldgate East, Liverpool Street St

24 November 2012 – 24 February 2013

Portsmouth City Museum and Art Gallery, Museum Road, 
Portsmouth, 
PO1 2LJ

The history of making is implicated in the stories of the places we live and of what we do. Textile making is present in the material and fabrics of our lives, the clothes we wear, the wrappings that are at beginnings and ends of life in the form of blankets and shrouds. The language of textile permeates the conversations and dialogues of the everyday, as ornament to embroider tales and as a substance which clothes.

Textiles is my medium and I have looked to the histories of Portsmouth as a naval city in order to make these works. I have used ‘direction’ as to explore the nature of the continuous line of thread and the passage of the wind.

My starting point was my own nymph in the contemporary applied arts Gallery of the Museum. As a watery emblem she signifies the deepest connection of Portsmouth with the sea. I looked further into the museum collections to find the evidence of material and the distinctive stories of a harbour city. I found the Blue ensign from the hospital carrier ship ‘Lady Connaught’, which served off the US beaches at Normandy. There is a white ensign flag flown by LCT 7092 on D-Day and a Union flag [in two halves] from D-Day beaches. There is even a piece of the ensign flag which was draped over Nelson’s coffin at his funeral.

I found a main sail and jib sail from the Victory class boat Z2 ‘Magpie’ and I found Napoleonic canon balls and torpedoes dredged up from the harbour depths.

I found three connections which I have drawn together through these works. Firstly the nymph in the top Gallery. The second is textile, my material and those of the sails. In the summer 2012 I made the sails for the Boat project as part of the cultural Olympiad, thus sails are in my mind. The third is Nelson, my birthday is on Trafalgar day, the day of Nelson’s death in warfare. Recently I visited the stores at the National Maritime Museum and was shown the jacket that Nelson died in. It sent shivers down my spine.

In textiles I make my tribute to these events and these local and national histories.

Making It: A celebration of craft and community in Winchester
Winchester Discovery centre, Winchester
12-14 October 2012

A multi stranded celebration of making and creativity which takes place in Winchester
and reveals how craft and the process of making is central to our everyday lives.

www.makingitproject.com
A multi stranded celebration of making and creativity which takes place in Winchester and reveals how craft and the process of making is central to our everyday lives.

This event champions craft and making through activities, exhibitions, installations, workshops, talking about making, learning about making and a World café party. Making It is a celebration of craft and creativity. It will take participants into the mind of the maker, revealing the processes of making. Making It will helps us all to understand the value of hand-making and of individual creativity.

The Making It programme celebrates creativity. Alongside invited speakers, artists, makers, and a variety of participants the festival will demonstrate the central place of craft and making in our lives today.

With a different focus for each day the events are designed to engage with audiences through activity, participation and discourse. With specific events for makers, teachers, families and children Making It shows how craft is an important part of how we live and work.

The event aims to be all inclusive from academics to practitioners, for adults and children. The programme will include seminars and lectures to open current debates in craft practice, marketing and education. Other events show makers making, films, theatre and demonstrations.

Making It will bring together making and makers to establish new connections, to share ideas and simply enjoy talking, thinking and crafting.

www.theboatproject.com

http://margatehoststheboat.org/

http://www.turnercontemporary.org/public-programme/margate-hosts-the-boat

Sail and accompanying flags made for Margate Hosts the Boat project. The images were gifted by local schools and community groups which I incorporated into the design. The sail is doubled sided, 10m high. A procession through Margate on the 15th of July gifted the sail to the boat, but the weather was too bad to raise it on the mast.

A series of flags and were raised on the harbour arm.

Thank you to Annabel Perrin and Colin Angus at Manchester School of Art and to Simon Northrop of Northrop sails. Also to Parrabolla to asked me to make it.
The boat is now touring UK and heading for Weymouth and then Europe.

Material Response
May 31-July 15

Queen Street Mill, Burnley, BB10 2HX
Steve Dixon – Alison Welsh – Alice Kettle – Lesley Mitchison – Andrea Zapp

A series of installations of thought provoking new work by artists set amongst the machinery and history of the mill

Date for the diary-
Artists live day- 23rd June, 1pm-4pm, Queen Street Mill, Burnley

http://storiesoftheworldnw.tumblr.com/post/24127502914/cotton-exchange-highlights

http://www.facebook.com/pages/Queen-Street-Mill-Textile-Museum/130293100338038

Here I have used cotton thread to articulate the language of making which link the lives of the weavers at Queens Mill Burnley and the textile makers in particular the embroiderers of India. The common language is a line of cotton and the lineage of making.

In Queens St Mill are the notices which define the working pattern, the imposed hardships of working productively. These are the Rules and Regulations. These notices have given voice to the individuals, I have made new notices through inviting the women in the villages of Kutch to make their own rules of life which have been defined through textiles and the lineage of making. These women used pattern and motif and here is their own description through interpreter Judy Frater

The women spent time thinking and drawing.  Most of the Rabaris used traditional motifs that depict their life.  I will detail the final outcomes when I send the work.  Varshaben Pratap did butterflies.  She said, they are free and light and can go anywhere.  Damyantiben Shankar did flowers.  She said they are smiling all the time.  Salmaben Jat did a miniature yoke.  She said this is our tradition and our identity.  Monghiben Rana did a vine that blossomed into a traditional motif.  She said she wants her creativity to always include tradition.  My favourite was Hariyaben.  She did a mango.  She said it is sometimes sweet, sometimes sour, and always valued from when it is small, when it is not yet ripe, and when it is ripe.

To echo these voices I have stitched out voices from the Queen Street mill. These come from the ledger and are the memories of the workers who were in the Mill when it was productive. Their voices are evocative, passed to me by Margarte Nowak;

Oliver Benjamin, weaver 1930-1948 ‘Noisy’

Pauline and William Hamer were lovely people. Mr Hamer had been born deaf and had attended a school for the deaf where in those days it was traditional to teach them basket making. His enthusiasm for his craft despite a forty/fifty year absence of work still shone through, though his comment doesn’t show the devastation he felt at the closing of his works as the textile industry collapsed and took with it the industry that he had been trained for.

Shelagh Limmer says, “I still gag at the smell of the tape size room” This is because they boiled carcasses to produce a cheap gluey thickener for the size which coated the warp threads to make them smooth and strong.

Some of these words have also found their way into a series of shaft loom belts. These are the link between the steam engine in Queens mill and each individual loom. I have used the technologies of new digital embroidery to pattern the belts of what was new technology of steam production, with images collected from the mill , from india , from the block printer Barron and Larcher and the writings of Gandhi. A hot potch of pattern, philosophies, cultures, exchange and production.
The final set of works are three chandeliers metaphors for the illuminating the night time work. One is white and neutral made from the pirns of Queens st which are strung around a metal chandelier. One is coloured made from the wooden pirns from India and a second is made from paper pirns made from paper from the Gandhi ashram

Embroidered loom belts

Conversations & Collaborations’
April 28 –May 27 2012
Museum in the Park
GL5 4AF

Images of new collaborative work with Jane Webb and David Gates

Alice Kettle November 2011

Pairings II Conversations and Collaborations is a simple thought; to celebrate uniqueness and togetherness. The intention is to celebrate making and makers and engage with another to learn and understand more.

This exhibition brings together partnerships of makers to discuss and share the experience of making. Collaboration raises questions about ownership, it tests recognised working methods and negotiates how voices resonate and sing together. It is the evidence of this dialogue between makers which has given birth to work and ideas that redefine the nature of the object and of craft. The subsequent artefact or collection of pieces, combine a marriage or parallel exploration of materials, of practices and creative identities.

The exhibition places makers and designers together in pairs or in threesomes. Each participant has a distinct and established area of their own practice which they have shared with another maker in order to have an experience of a different material, a new process and an exchange of ideas. The exhibition will show the evidence of these playful duets and trios and the in between conversations, where materials and methods are questioned or where different approaches are placed together in reflection or contradiction. The show will demonstrate intriguing combinations which challenge our notions of creative identity and ownership.

The participants come from a variety of material backgrounds. This newly commissioned exhibition by Stroud International Textile Festival develops new working  partnerships with at least one maker working with textiles. Other works are selected from the ‘Pairings’ collaborative project originally initiated in 2009 at Manchester Metropolitan University and the ‘Stitching and Thinking Group’ at University of the West of England.

Glass is pinned into felt, ceramics are stitched, and objects are woven. These cross fertilisations of voice and material may be a temporary shift of direction and a testing of other skills which can impact more permanently on individual practice. The courage of the makers to expose and expand their working methods must be acknowledged as they search for new territories which are joined and connected materially. With their companion they have talked and critiqued each other’s work with new understandings of common ground. Ismini Samanidiou and Sharon Blakey describe their experience as ‘like a whirlwind romance: a passionate affair of fleeting encounters and intense assignations.’ But one which,’ revealed a deeply rooted, mutual aesthetic in the impermanence and beauty of the everyday and evidence of the transitory.’ 1

Some have found possibilities in new technologies and in alternative processes and tools. They have applied these new discoveries to their own material. Stephen Dixon and Jessamy Kelly describe making new ‘treasures’.  Duncan Ayscough and Heather Belcher discovered a ‘shared passion for material, process and words’  and an ‘opportunity for me to step outside my own, focused, practice and to share my discipline whilst obtaining valuable and inspiring insights into a new material.’2

As Claire Curneen puts it: a simple thought can lead to, ‘a simple conversation with a like-minded stranger,’ which ‘ can produce some unexpected ideas.’3

1.              Gröppel-Wegener, A. (2010) Pairings: exploring collaborative creative practice. Manchester Metropolitan University: The Pairings Project/Blurb 2010. P58

2.              As above . P.94

3.              As above. P.10

        Crafts Magazine

Exhibition with Alice Kettle & Jules Findley

Chichester Cathedral  18.2.2012 – 29.3.2012

A project which explores issues of loss.

The project focuses on personal loss and the wider context of loss reflecting social political agendas.
The work developed explores notions of the loss of the hand-made alongside the emergence of the digital. Working with industry major artworks have been produced which research the expressive potential of digital stitch outside of the production bias.

Paradise Lost
looks at loss of landscape and life in response to the Japanese Tsunami 2011 and the subsequent nuclear catastrophe 2011.
It is a work in homage to those who lost their lives.
Beyond this immediate event the work makes reference to Milton’s epic narrative poem Paradise Lost. The poem’s central theme surrounds the fall of Adam and Eve, and examines its cause and the possibility of redemption. ‘Felix culpa’ or fortunate fall expresses optimism, the emergence into a better place as a consequence of the fall, through God’s mercy and the birth of Christ.
The background of the stitched piece echoes Piero della Francesca’s ‘Nativity’ in the National Gallery. In this case what was an italianate landscape has become industrial and radiation damaged. What should be the angels are a group of children mutated by the impact of exposure.

Homage to Guernica
looks at war and the consequent loss of life. The work looks ate the shift of perspective from horizontal to the vertical as with Picasso’s Guernicca which contains symbols which change form a different perspective. The association is that war is a matter in part of perspective which can changed and shifted through attitude. If not the consequence is powerfully destructive. The simple device of change from vertical to horizontal and vice versa is used to denote life, and death.