Painting into Textile: Inspired by Michael Kidner: GROUP EXHIBITION Curated by Alice Kettle
Flowers Gallery

Alice Kettle curated this one-day exhibition at Flowers Gallery, which showcased work by textile students and staff from Manchester School of Art, created in response to the works of renowned British artist Michael Kidner. The new textile pieces were shown alongside a display of Kidner’s original paintings.

Seven students were selected to develop work for the exhibition from a field of fifty who responded to the project. Professor Emeritus Alice Kettle and programme leader in Textiles in Practice, Lesley Mitchison, also developed new work alongside the students, demonstrating the rich seam of inspiration Kidner’s oeuvre had provided.

Michael Kidner was at the forefront of Optical Art in the 1960s, producing works that used repeated systematic structures and distinctive colour palettes. His interest in mathematics, science and chaos theories informed an artistic practice that can be described as both formal and playful.

For this project, Kidner’s works were reinterpreted into new surfaces using knit, weave, textile print and embroidery. His ‘Waves’ became cloths and scarves of twisting weaves, while linear and diagrammatic elements were translated into physical, three-dimensional thread structures. Grids of colour inspired optical grounds of cloth, stitch patterning and knitted dresses. The works demonstrated how a source could be re-conceptualised through textiles as a flexible and expressive material way of thinking.