Within Each Other, Portraits of Ourselves built on Alice Kettle's Thread Bearing Witness project shown at The Whitworth in 2018 and continued her collaborative approach, bringing together contributions from expert stitchers from Syria, Iran, Pakistan, and Uganda. Their hand stitching was integrated into Kettle’s drawn portraits, acknowledging the collective nature of the works.
The portraits explored memory, experience, and identity, using stitch as a means of connection across borders, cultures, and technologies. The works reflected an expansion of Kettle’s practice, combining traditional hand stitching with digitised methods, and drawing on her background as a painter through the use of machine-stitched fields of colour and finely detailed hand-worked areas.