found objects, wood on canvas
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 rich in colour and misty atmosphere, populated by sketched, classically inflected figures. Leahy, by contrast, was firmly rooted in the present: her images were monochrome, closely observed details, meticulously worked with the precision of an engraving. Working through the medium of textiles, both employ thread and line as narrative functions, describing the relationships between the characters and objects they depict. The Narrative Line toured three venues in Northern Ireland and the Irish Republic, and the accompanying publication features an essay by Simon Olding.
“My storytelling with thread concerns longing, searching, questioning, and discovery. With the alchemy of stitch I can reconfigure, redraw and create a narrative line made up of the twisted threads running over and through and around each other.” – Alice Kettle.
The centrepiece of the show was a new work by Kettle inspired by a local Kilkenny woman, Alice Kyttler (the Gaelic form of Alice Kettle), who was accused of witchcraft in the Middle Ages. Kettle depicts her proudly standing in a pool of light—or perhaps flames—wearing an elaborate patchwork skirt and flanked by three naked male figures. The work examines issues of female power and powerlessness. The condemned medieval witch appears here as an alter ego who, through stitch, is given back her power. Grounded in historical and documentary evidence, the work examines the condition of the feminine through a reimagining of the actual. In turning to witchcraft, it interrogates persistent misconceptions about feminine power.
Another key work, Incubus (2011), is based on a mythological demon. Kettle’s namesake, the medieval Alice Kyteler of Kilkenny, was accused of sorcery, heresy, and consorting with an incubus in one of the first recorded witch trials of the fourteenth century. Here, the incubus appears as an emergent figurative form, taking shape through the contortions of stitched cloth.
