Past
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IN THE WIND’S HANDS
GROUP EXHIBITION
BoLee & Workman 14 Jun - 19 Jul 2025 In The Wind’s Hands invites viewers into a tactile landscape where material becomes emotion and texture speaks its own language. This exhibition brings together artists Kim Booker, Katie Cuddon, Lydia Gifford, Alice Kettle, Roy Oxlade and Daniel Silver, whose practices center on the expressive power of texture. Here, gesture, surface,... Read more -
Soft Power: Lives told through textile art
GROUP EXHIBITION CO-CURATED BY ALICE KETTLE
Royal West of England Academy 17 May - 10 Aug 2025 Soft Power:Lives told through Textile Art' was an international exhibition curated by textile art pioneer Professor Alice Kettle, with curator of international textiles Professor Lesley Millar MBE. The exhibition featured works by Alice Kettle, Alice Maher, Amneh Shaikh-Farooqui, Anurita Chandola, Audrey Walker, Enam Gbewonyo, Ellen Sharples, Erin M Riley, Jane... Read more -
Fabric of Life
GROUP EXHIBITION
Paul Smith Space 17 Nov 2024 - 3 Jan 2025 The Fabric of Life was an exhibition that explored how contemporary artists used textiles to express personal, social and cultural narratives. Bringing together an international and intergenerational group of practitioners, the exhibition presented work made through weaving, embroidery, sewing, dyeing, tufting, collage, digital processes and painting. The versatility of textile... Read more -
With Every Fiber
GROUP EXHIBITION
Aicon Contemporary 18 Jul - 10 Aug 2024 With Every Fiber was an exhibition exploring the narrative, political, and emotional capacities of textile art. It was presented at Aicon Contemporary from July 18th to August 10th, 2024, and brought together artists whose practices challenged the historical marginalization of textiles within the contemporary art canon. “Along with cave paintings,... Read more
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Presence: the Figure in British Postwar Contemporary Sculpture.
GROUP EXHIBITION
Messums West Gallery 6 Jul - 23 Sep 2024 PRESENCE: The Figure in British Postwar and Contemporary Sculpture was held in the 13th-century tithe barn at Messums West as part of Messums’ 2024 season of sculptural exhibitions. PRESENCE brought together world-class postwar and contemporary figurative sculpture to ask what gives an inanimate object the emotive presence of a living... Read more -
Harewood Biennial 2024: Create/Elevate
GROUP EXHIBITION
Harewood House 1 Jun - 31 Oct 2024 The third edition of Harewood Biennial, 'Create/Elevate', celebrated the power of craft to surprise, inspire and bring people together to imagine new worlds. Presented within Harewood House, and across its grounds and gardens, it brought together the work of 16 British and international artists, designers and craft collectives including four... Read more -
Threads – Breathing Stories Into Materials
GROUP EXHIBITION CO-CURATED BY ALICE KETTLE
ARNOLFINI 8 Jul - 1 Oct 2023 Threads was a major exhibition at Arnolfini, co-curated by Alice Kettle, featuring 21 contemporary international artists and makers who use textiles as their chosen medium. Celebrating material and making, the exhibition explored the storytelling power of textiles to connect with past traditions, find commonalities between cultures, time, and place, and... Read more -
TO BOLDLY SEW
SOLO EXHIBITION
Brookfield Properties 5 Jul - 29 Sep 2023 Several significant and large works made over nearly twenty years feature in what is a large-scale solo presentation of the artist’s work over two London venues. The works range in date from 2006 (The Schiffli Series) to 2023. Each year The Brookfield Properties Craft Award honours a maker who has... Read more
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In Theoria: 4th International Hangzhou Triennial of Fibre Art
GROUP EXHIBITION
Zhejiang Art Museum 18 Oct - 5 Dec 2022 Alice Kettle participated in the 4th Hangzhou Triennial of Fibre Art, an exhibition that explored fibre as both material and metaphor—rooted in the ancient Chinese silk radical Mì/Sī , where ideas of relation, structure, text, texture, and culture converge. The triennial approached fibre as a fundamental language through which human... Read more -
Kalila wa Dimna: Ancient Tales for Troubled Times
GROUP EXHIBITION
P21 Gallery 12 May - 11 Jun 2022 Kalila wa Dimna: Ancient Tales for Troubled Times was an art exhibition and public programme developed in collaboration with academic researchers, artists, curators, and community organisations. The project was inspired by the global journeys of an ancient collection of moral fables across time and place, language, religion, and culture. Known... Read more -
Threadbound
SOLO EXHIBITION
Candida Stevens Gallery 16 Oct - 12 Nov 2021 For centuries humans have exchanged flowers as an expression of the entire emotional range and throughout art history they have been symbolic. People have long imbued flowers with personal, cultural, and religious significance and creatives have been drawn to them for their evocative qualities, “When you take a flower in... Read more -
Untitled, 2020
GROUP EXHIBITION
Punta della Dogana 22 Mar - 19 Dec 2020 Punta della Dogana presented the exhibition Untitled, 2020 , conceived and curated by Caroline Bourgeois, Muna El Fituri, and the artist Thomas Houseago. Conceived especially for the spaces of Punta della Dogana, Untitled, 2020 was organised thematically and presented works by more than 60 artists from the Pinault Collection, as... Read more
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Fabric: Touch and Identity
GROUP EXHIBITION CO-CURATED BY ALICE KETTLE
Compton Verney Gallery 14 Mar - 31 Dec 2020 Playful and provocative, this exhibition explored how the qualities of cloth conceal, reveal, and seduce through the prisms of art, design, film, and dance. The drape, fold, touch, and feel of fabric were used to examine identity as a sensual, gendered, and political experience by artists including Raisa Kabir, Vivienne... Read more -
The House of Opposites Project
GROUP COLLABORATION
Dean Clough Gallery 15 Feb - 24 Apr 2020 ‘The House of Opposites’ is an experimental travelling artwork, created by artists Eleanor Mulhearn, Alison Duddle, and Alice Kettle, with writer Jenna C. Ashton, The work draws inspiration from artist Leonora Carrington’s painting, The House Opposite (1945), and from collective memories of the childhood dollhouse, which combined, have evolved into... Read more -
Unbound: Visionary Women Collecting Textiles
GROUP EXHIBITION
Two Temple Place 25 Jan - 19 Apr 2020 Textiles and costume give us a beautiful and intensely human insight into our history. Unbound: Visionary Women Collecting Textiles celebrated seven pioneering women who saw beyond the purely functional, to reveal the extraordinary artistic, social and cultural importance of textiles. From the exquisite anthropological collections of traditional Balkan costume by... Read more -
Karachi Biennale 19
GROUP EXHIBITION 26 Oct - 12 Nov 2019 Alice Kettle’s project Thread Bearing Witness was launched in 2017. This major project looks at issues of displacement and cultural movement using textiles and specifically stitch as a common language. The project included a public participation strand called Stitch a Tree project which invited small stitched contributions from individuals, groups... Read more
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Horizontal Crossings
GROUP EXHIBITION
Hanshan Art Museum 28 Apr - 19 Jul 2019 Horizontal Crossings was a project exploring how a single ‘thread’ can connect people, and how this simple element, together with the technique of stitching, can be transformed into both embroidery and fine art. Curated by Assadour Markarov, Professor in the Fiber Art Department at the School of Sculpture and Public... Read more -
Thread Bearing Witness
SOLO EXHIBITION
Whitworth Gallery 1 Sep 2018 - 24 Feb 2019 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... Read more -
Threads
SOLO EXHIBITION
Winchester Discovery Centre 28 Oct 2017 - 14 Jan 2018 Alice Kettle returned to Winchester Discovery Centre with Threads , a solo exhibition marking ten years since her celebrated public artwork for the city, Looking Forwards to the Past (2007). This mini-retrospective traced a decade of her practice in hand, machine and digital stitch, and introduced the first work in... Read more -
Ink and Blood - Stories of Abolition
GROUP EXHIBITION
International Slavery Museum 21 Aug 2017 - 8 Apr 2018 The exhibition concerned the Transatlantic Slave Trade, its abolition and modern slavery. The focus was on the lives and personal stories of slaves from Argentina, Cuba, Jamaica, the United States and Bahrain. Two works by Alice Kettle depict portraits of cotton slaves. Cotton Slave Adam' and 'Cotton Slave Eve' explore... Read more
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Made In Translation
GROUP EXHIBITION CURATED BY ALICE KETTLE
The Portico Library 27 Apr - 26 Jun 2017 What is it to read? What is it to write? What is a living collection? Made in Translation was a collaborative project between craft practitioners and researchers in Manchester Metropolitan University’s Faculty of Arts and Humanities, and The Portico Library. The Portico Library’s collection of books provided a rich source... Read more -
The Scalloped Edge
SOLO EXHIBITION
Galerios dos Prazeros 15 Jul - 9 Oct 2016 This exhibition is a collection of works which link the embroidery traditions of Madeira to my own contemporary stitch practice. The project uses stitch as a common cultural language to make connections through motif, process and metaphor. The sharing and exchange of the tacit knowledge with the local community in... Read more -
VAS:T 15
GROUP EXHIBITION
Scottish Royal Society of Arts 6 - 28 Feb 2015 Alice Kettle was one of five artists invited to exhibit her work at Visual Arts Scotland’s annual exhibition at the Scottish Royal Society of Arts in 2015 . For this she collaborated with Kirsteen Aubrey and Amanda Ravaetz, a visual anthropologist and Senior Fellow in Miriad. The work spanned Textiles,... Read more -
A Place At the Table
GROUP EXHIBITION CURATED BY ALICE KETTLE
Pallant House Gallery 25 Nov 2014 - 18 Jan 2015 A Place at the Table was developed by Alice Kettle, with Victoria Brown for Pallant House Gallery. The project challenged categorisations of craft, with Kettle as curator and artist. A Place at the Table presented craft as social, functional, relational, performative and for its material character. The project had multiple... Read more
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Unraveling Uppark
GROUP EXHIBITION
Uppark House 4 May - 2 Nov 2014 Unravelling Uppark , was the third and final exhibition of the series Unravelling the National Trust. For Unravelling Uppark , thirteen artists were commissioned by Unravelled Arts to respond to moments and events in the rich and complex histories of Uppark House. Their work explored this site of personal and... Read more -
Pairings
GROUP EXHIBITION CURATED BY ALICE KETTLE
Contemporary Applied Arts 1 - 30 May 2013 The Pairings exhibition at CAA was the culmination of a three year, international cross-institutional and cross material project Pairings, which was conceived and initiated by Alice Kettle at the Manchester School of Art. The project aimed to create dialogue between makers and materials in order to encounter alternative perspectives and... Read more -
The Garden of England
SOLO EXHIBITION
The Queens House,
The National Maritime Museum 14 Mar - 18 Aug 2013 The Garden of England was the inaugural project of the Royal Museums Greenwich contemporary art programme at the Queen’s House. Responding to the museum’s portrait collection, Alice created three new works that celebrated the queens and courtiers who inhabited the seventeenth-century Queen’s House. Her work spoke to the original setting... Read more -
Fix, Fix, Fix
GROUP EXHIBITION
Gallery S O 15 Feb - 24 Mar 2013 FIX, FIX, FIX was a group exhibition curated by Glenn Adamson, which brought together British and international artists and makers. It included curated objects made outside of an art context by self-taught and professional repairers, alongside commissioned works by artists who were asked to respond to the exhibition theme. In... Read more
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Pairings II: Conversations and Collaborations
GROUP EXHIBITION CO-CURATED BY ALICE KETTLE
Stroud International Textile Festival 28 Apr - 27 May 2012 Pairings II: Conversations and Collaborations was the sole exhibition of the Stroud International Textile Festival in 2012, and marked a continuation of the Pairings project initiated by Alice Kettle and Alex McErlain in 2009. The project aimed to create dialogue between makers and materials in order to encounter alternative perspectives... Read more -
Loss
GROUP EXHIBITION
Chichester Cathedral 18 Feb - 29 Mar 2012 LOSS was an exhibition of textile art by Jules Findley and Alice Kettle which explored the subject of loss and bereavement using a variety of media. Kettle's works included 'Homage to Guernica' (2011), a powerful textile piece that reinterprets Picasso's anti-war masterpiece, shifting from a bleak landscape to an industrial,... Read more -
Cotton Exchange: Material Responses
GROUP EXHIBITION
An Exchange between India and the UK 12 Feb 2012 - 1 May 2013 Cotton Exchange was a project that ran over two years, involving 13 artists from the UK and India who exchanged ideas and travelled to each other’s cities. The project explored the heritage of the cotton industry and the historical links between Lancashire and Manchester in the UK, and Ahmedabad and... Read more -
7th International Triennale of Tournai
GROUP EXHIBITION
11 Jun - 25 Sep 2011 The 7th International Triennale of Contemporary Textiles, subtitled T he Five Continents: Woven World , was held in historic houses all around the city of Tournai in Belgium. Alice Kettle was proud to exhibit three works from her ‘Heads Series’. The series of ‘Heads’ is an ongoing project, but the... Read more
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Lost Certainty
TWO PERSON SHOW
Contemporary Applied Arts 6 May - 11 Jun 2011 Lost Certainty was a joint exhibition by renowned textile artist Alice Kettle and figurative ceramic sculptor Claire Curneen, showcasing their distinct but complementary works. =The exhibition explored themes of humanity, loss, and identity, with Kettle's rich textiles contrasting Curneen's poignant ceramic figures. “Whilst we are distinctly ourselves in this exhibition... Read more -
The Narrative Line
TWO PERSON EXHIBITION
The Crafts Council of Ireland 29 Oct 2010 - 12 Jan 2011 The Narrative Line was a two-person exhibition featuring work by Alice Kettle and Bernie Leahy. The exhibition’s title signals the curators’ interest in both artists’ ability to use stitch as a storytelling device. Kettle investigated the dynamics of everyday relationships through the vehicle of the mythic, producing large-scale wall hangings... Read more -
Pairings
GROUP EXHIBITION CO-CURATED BY ALICE KETTLE
Special Collections Gallery, Manchester Metropolitan University 1 Oct - 30 Nov 2010 The Pairings project was initiated by Alice Kettle and Alex McErlain at Manchester School of Art with the aim of bringing together makers from different craft specialisms. Collaborative creative practice was explored through the pairing of two or three practitioners from different disciplines and institutions, with the intention of producing... Read more -
TELLING FORTUNES
SOLO EXHIBITION
Gallery of Costume Manchester 15 Sep - 31 Dec 2010 Alice Kettle drew on the Gallery of Costumes’ collections of gloves and embroidery to inspire this piece of work. She described Platt Hall as “a treasure trove; magical, awe inspiring [and] a compendium of textile history and the stories of lives passed.” Having been allowed closer inspection of items from... Read more
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A Pause in the Rhythm of Time
SOLO EXHIBITION
Belger Arts Center 29 May - 4 Sep 2009 A Pause in the Rhythm of Time was Alice Kettle’s first major solo exhibition in the United States. The exhibition presented a substantial group of large-scale machine embroideries, shown at the Belger Arts Center. A major work in the presentation was Towers , a large-scale textile triptych created in response... Read more -
Allegory
SOLO EXHIBITION
Craft Study Centre, Farnham and Tour 3 Feb 2009 - 17 Jun 2010 'Allegory’ (2009–2010) was a solo touring exhibition hosted by the Craft Study Centre, UCA Farnham, and documented in the accompanying catalogue ‘Alice Kettle: Allegory’ by Simon Olding. ‘Allegory’ reflects Alice Kettle’s interest in the ways narrative can be expressed through machine-worked embroidery, encompassing both large-scale wall hangings and a series... Read more -
Place Settings
TWO PERSON EXHIBITION
Manchester Metropolitan University 18 Aug - 14 Nov 2008 Helen Felcey and Alice Kettle Research and collaboration in places and pieces, ceramics and stitch. Alice Kettle and Helen Felcey have a history of collaboration that began with the joint exhibition Place Settings . Alice Kettle was commissioned by Hampshire County Council to create a major public artwork for the... Read more -
The Fabric of Myth
GROUP EXHIBITION
Compton Verney 21 Jun - 7 Sep 2008 This exhibition explored the theme of myths through the medium and history of textiles. From Ariadne’s thread to the story of Arachne transformed from weaver to spider, these narratives communicated associations including redemption, protection, metamorphosis, and communication. The exhibition explored the ways textiles had shaped both cultural and personal myths.... Read more
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Mechanical drawing, Schiffli project
GROUP EXHIBITION
Manchester Metropolitan University 16 Nov - 14 Dec 2007 This was an exhibition of artwork by fifteen artists using a historic embroidery machine—the last remaining machine of its kind. The artists, mainly staff from the Faculty of Art and Design, at Manchester Metropolitan University, produced their work using the 100-year-old Schiffli , a multi-needle embroidery machine capable of mechanically... Read more -
Mythscapes
SOLO EXHIBITION
hosted by the Bankfield Museum 15 Apr 2003 - 18 Nov 2005 Alice Kettle's solo show ‘Mythscapes’ hosted by the Bankfield Museum in Halifax toured the UK between January 2003 until the end of 2005. This show is based on Homer’s ‘Odyssey’ and was supported by the Arts Council of Great Britain. Venues included Bankfield Museum Halifax;MAC, Birmingham; The Gallery, Ruthin Craft... Read more -
Masterpieces: Centenary Exhibition of Applied Modern Arts 1902-2002
GROUP EXHIBITION
Palazzo Bricherasio, Turin 5 Dec 2002 - 26 Jan 2003 Organised by the World Crafts Council Europe , this international exhibition celebrated the centenary of the 1902 Prima Esposizione Internazionale d'Arte Decorativa Moderna (First International Exposition of Modern Decorative Arts) held in Turin). It showcased a range of contemporary applied arts, including ceramics, glass, textiles, goldwork, jewellery, and mixed media... Read more
