Thread Bearing Witness

Thread Bearing Witness is a major project by Alice Kettle that explores themes of migration, displacement and cultural heritage through the contributions of migrants and women’s groups. The resulting artworks are stitched from stories and imagery of individuals and seek to raise awareness of the global refugee crisis and the empowerment of women. The project uses textiles as a powerful medium to learn from and show solidarity with displaced people around the world, with stitch acting as a shared language that connects communities and promotes individual empowerment in a climate of exclusionist politics.

The project was launched in 2017 with the ten‑year anniversary Threads exhibition at Winchester Discovery Centre and was fully realised in 2018–19 with a major exhibition at the Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester, where Kettle’s monumental works Sea, Ground and Sky were first shown together. These works are informed by personal testimonies and contributions from refugees and asylum seekers in the UK and in camps in Europe, and embrace both the domestic and the spectacular to encourage understanding through shared making. The project examines displacement through the lens of textiles — a material with its own history of migration and cultural exchange — and tests ways of belonging within a cultural space.

For these works Kettle connected with hundreds of individuals and groups of refugees and asylum seekers in the UK and in camps in Europe, asking them to contribute to and inform the works through the common language of stitch. Alongside the exhibition, a broad programme of community engagement included Stitch a Tree, a public participation project that invited thousands of small stitched contributions from individuals, groups and refugee communities to create a collective artwork demonstrating solidarity, resilience and connectedness. Stitch a Tree was shown at multiple venues and later expanded internationally, including at Karachi Biennale 2019 with women’s embroidery groups contributing distinct regional styles.

Thread Bearing Witness was later shown at venues including Gawthorpe Hall during the British Textile Biennial 2019 and Somerset Rural Life Museum in 2021, and encompasses multiple strands of practice that foreground creativity, participation and community engagement as part of a shared response to one of the most pressing social challenges of our time.

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