Thread Bearing Witness: SOLO EXHIBITION
Whitworth Gallery

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 was launched in 2017 with the ten-year anniversary Threads exhibition at Winchester Discovery Centre and was fully realised in 2018 with a major exhibition  at the Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester, where Kettle's monumental works 'Sea', 'Ground' and 'Sky' were first shown together. 

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 them through the common language of stitch.  'Sea', 'Ground' and 'Sky' embrace both the personal testimonies of the refugees, and textiles’ role, from the domestic to the spectacular, to encourage understanding in a chronicle of shared making. 

Acccompanying the exhibition at the Whitworth was a broad programme of community engagement workshops including  'Stitch a Tree', a project which invited small stitched contributions from individuals, groups and refugee communities to create a collective artwork which demonstrated solidarity and resilience. 

Thread Bearing Witness was later shown at venues including Gawthorpe Hall during the British Textile Biennial 2019 and Somerset Rural Life Museum in 2021.

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