6,053 research outputs found
Painting in thread: reflections on my life and work
No full text7 May 1997. Note with tape: Alice Kettle is a leading textile artist based in the UK. Her work is largely figurative, making use of machine embroidery techniques. While in Australia, Alice Kettle is Visiting Artist in the CSA Textiles Workshop
The erotic cloth: seduction and fetishism in textiles
No full textBook commissioned by Bloomsbury Publishing and co-edited by Lesley Millar and Alice Kettle who also contributed a joint introduction, introductions to each section and a chapter each.
The book takes a trans-disciplinary approach to the subject positing a variety of interpretations in which erotic is a multifaceted state, historically and culturally connected and materialised through our relationship with cloth. The contributions are written in a variety of tones, including those of practitioners and academics.
The introduction discusses the theme from a Western historical and contemporary context, drawing upon the editors specialism in textiles as artistic practice. It closes with an afterword which builds upon the Japanese focus in the final chapter, looking at the notion from an entirely non-Western perspective. By doing this, the editors signpost further research into how other cultures negotiate the relationship between cloth and the erotic.
The relationship between cloth and the body has been discussed in depth since the late twentieth century, mainly with a focus on the socio-political and narrative particularities of textiles. With the emergence of Haptic studies (Hara, Miller, Pallasmaa etc), the connection between the surface of the skin and the surface of cloth has been considered in the discussion of the sense of touch. However, the erotic nature of that relationship has tended to be the subtext of previous discourse, acknowledged but largely unspoken. This book specifically seeks to discover the ways in which the qualities of cloth that seduce, conceal and reveal have been explored and exploited in art, design, cinema, politics and dance. There will be a major exhibition based on the book, curated by the editors at Compton Verney in 2021.
The book includes contributions from: Savithri Barlett, Catherine Dormor, Malcolm Garrett, Catherine Harper, Ruth Hingston, Nigel Hurlstone, Yuko Ikeda, Claire Jones, Angela Maddock, Masako Matsushita, Liz Rideal, Debra Roberts, Mary Schoeser, Georgina Williams, and Caroline Wintersgill
Ellen Kettle
No full textPhotograph from Library & Archives NT PH0127/0001 and PH0127/0054Ellen Kettle completed her general nursing training in 1945 and her Midwifery training and certificate in 1951. She then worked for six months on Thursday Island caring for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. This experience prompted her to write to the Director of Health in Canberra to ask for an opportunity to work as a nurse in the Northern Territory. Kettle then commenced nursing on a Government Aboriginal settlement about 185 miles from Alice Springs.
In 1954 Nurse Kettle was appointed the Commonwealth Department of Health's first Rural Survey Sister, pioneering mobile health work in isolated areas of the Northern Territory. Over the next five decades she almost single-handedly revolutionised Aboriginal health in the Northern Territory by creating medical records for thousands of patients and drawing attention to their plight, particularly in regard to high infant mortality. In 1967 Miss Ellen Kettle received an OBE for her services to nursing.
Her personal papers are held at the Northern Territory Library and include diaries kept from 1959 to 1997 and her autobiography, Gone Bush, provides a remarkable insight into the work of this dedicated and courageous woman. Sister Ellen Kettle died in Darwin on 2 August 1999, aged 77.
Source: Northern Territory dictionary of biography. Darwin : Charles Darwin University Press, 2008.Nursing sisterAuthorHistoria
Mataranka Cemetery
No full textMataranka Cemetery. In the background is the utility that Ellen Kettle travelled north in from Alice Springs to Darwin.Kettle, Ellen
Alice Kettle: Threads
No full textTextile artist Alice Kettle returns to Winchester Discovery Centre with a solo exhibition marking the 10 year anniversary of the public artwork ‘Looking Forwards to the Past, 2007’. This immense, multi-layered piece, caused a fundamental shift in practice for the artist. The retrospective exhibition represents to use of hand, machine and digital stitch, as a narrative medium, characterising textile as a descriptive language. The works are n the English canon of the medieval Opus Anglicanum, using densely stitched figural to depict contemporary event. Stitch is uniquely expanded to the a large scale format creating installation works which use textile as a material narrative tableau. The exhibition has been reviewed in Crafts and Embroidery magazine and was covered in the Guardian, Stitch MAgazine and Arts Quest and the Tatler. A monograph accompanies the exhibition
Threadbound
No full textFor 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 your hand and really look at it, it’s your world for the moment,” Georgia O’Keeffe. In a departure from earlier works where the human figure often dominated, here it is the relationship between people and nature that takes centre stage. In these artworks, flowers are companion, inspiration and subject. This is both a reference to the larger contemporary issue of the human impact on the environment and the personal lived experience of an artist. Made between March 2020 and September 2021, a period of global pandemic, these artworks address the experience of being home bound and are consistent with the reaction of being preoccupied by one’s immediate surroundings. At home in Somerset with a studio overlooking an everchanging garden, these flowers were symbolic of the passing of time, progress. The work is about balance, the reciprocal relationship between human and nature. There is no dominance of humanity, the figure and the flower become blended, they are negotiating their relationship with each other and with their environment. The artist’s strong belief in the importance of creating a world in which we coexist harmoniously with nature is evident here: human faces morph with flowers, figures emerge from the plants. In others the lines between person and flower become blurred or fractured and the work becomes abstracted. “Alliances were sealed, allegiances sworn and passages to heaven bargained for with textiles” (Schoeser, 2012). I have no doubt the same could be said for flowers, and here Kettle skilfully combines the practice for which she is internationally known with a timely consideration for our significance in the earth’s evolution. Alice’s work draws references from the history of figurative textiles and monumental narrative tapestry. In her role as Professor at Manchester School of Art, Alice Kettle has researched the meeting place of traditional analogue stitching skills and digitised contemporary methodologies. She has developed a unique practice, creating textile works which employ a combination of stitch techniques, combining the use of antique machines from early last century with hand stitch and contemporary digital technology. Stitch is a method of repetition, coverage and endlessness, a bit like the circularity of the seasons
Alice Kettle: Thread Bearing Witness
No full textA major two venue project presenting new monumental textile works considering refugee displacement and movement. It includes significant new works by Alice Kettle & collaborative works with refugees from Dunkirk, North West & South England made through contribution and co-creation. It develops creative practice, creativity as resilience and supports and explores the intangible cultural heritage skills of refugee women, children and unaccompanied minors. It embraces personal testimonies and textiles role from the domestic to the spectacular to create a legacy of understanding and a chronicle of shared making. Migration is the defining issue of our time. How each individual, group, industry and family choose to respond to this subject will shape the foundations of our future communities. Simultaneously, Alice is working on a local level to connect personally with individual women and children refugees and asylum seekers, asking them to work with her to contribute to and inform new monumental stitched artworks. These artworks are inspired by the strength, resilience, and hospitality of refugees and asylum seekers whom she and her family have worked with. The Digital Women’s Archive North CIC (DWAN) is linking to the project the Travelling Heritage Bureau which will address both the need to ensure the participation of women artists in contributing to arts archives, and the additional complexities of displacement for undertaking arts archive development. Textiles offers a powerful medium through which to explore themes of cultural heritage, journeys and displacement. Embroidery is a domestic practice representing home-making, it is steeped in the history of trade routes with its global connections to production and pattern. The exhibition will use thread to examine the interconnected social world we live within
Stitch A Tree, Karachi
No full textAlice Kettle’s project Thread Bearing Witness was launched in 2017 www.threadbearingwitness.com. 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 and refugee communities to create a collective artwork which demonstrated solidarity and resilience. The tree acts as a creative metaphor, inviting participants to consider their lives, mapped onto the tree: roots representing cultural and social histories; branches representing sustainable futures. The trees reinforce our relationship with the environment and collectively as a forest represent the positive nature of individuality and diversity as an attribute of social cohesion. The original idea for the Stitch a Tree project came from the Refugee Resilience Collective, who worked with refugee children in Dunkirk refugee camp in April 2017 and used the ‘Tree of Life’ – to begin conversations with the children about strength and resilience. For Karachi Biennale19, Stitch a Tree creates a new Forest with the expert embroiderers of the region. Embroidery is one of the important practices undertaken by women. The new work celebrates the extraordinary skills of various groups, the distinct styles and stitches of indigenous embroidery. The work valorizes and brings together in one artwork the voice of women embroiderers in Karachi. The work is made by them, reflecting the distinct identity of Pakistani embroidery and the importance of these women’s contribution to cultural, economic and social life. In the Forest we come together as one community, using stitch to unify us in a shared language of making
An introduction to The Erotic Cloth
No full textThe publication The Erotic Cloth - Seduction and Fetishism in Textiles constitutes new and previously unpublished research on the aesthetics of cloth as a sensual medium and its relationship to the body. The book emerged from the eponymous colloquiam, has subsequently been the subject of 3 academic seminars, presented as a paper at the ‘Joy of the Erotic’ conference Palermo Sept 2018, Festival of Erotic Art, London 2019, a performance at the NAO Arts Festival Milan 2018 and informing the major exhibition The Sensuous Cloth hosted and funded by Compton Verney Art Gallery 2021. The book will be translated into Chinese in 2020. The volume was co-edited by Kettle and Prof Lesley Millar, Director of the International Textile Research Centre, UCA Farnham. It includes a co-authored introductory chapter, individual chapters and co-authored introductory sections by Kettle and Millar. The research surveys contemporary thinking contributing to material culture and haptic studies on the experience of the erotic through perspectives on the methods, politics and philosophies of encounters with cloth through a trans-disciplinary approach to the subject. Organised into four cognate sections, on representation, design, otherness and performance, the research addresses the elisions and frictions of the erotic in cloth and posits that cloth as a sensual material language permeates other fields of practice including art, design, cinema, politics and dance. It posits a variety of interpretations in which erotic is a multifaceted state, historically, culturally connected and materialised through our physical relationship with cloth. The contributions are written in a variety of tones, including those of 15 practitioners and academics. This book is the first critical examination of the erotically charged relationship between the surface of the skin and the touch of cloth, exploring the ways in which textiles can seduce, conceal and reveal through their interactions with the body
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