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It feels like a time of change. My work isn't any longer a frantic search for discovery, a race against time to express everything inside my head before it evaporates. And that has always been the paradox of stitching, balancing together its slowness in the making with the constant emergence of new ideas. Sometimes you grapple with both and you dart between one piece and the next with impatience while, at other moments, the rhythmic flow of the work lets the ideas form themselves like a bubble.
My machine and I have reached a kind of understanding, the kind of mutual respect where we know each other's thought processes and working methods. It was always like being a horse breaker: to break the unruly will of this animal and to become its master. And the machine would kick back, with a defiant spirit. And then some gentle coaxing, infinite patience, an uneasy peace and a sudden lashing out by one or other of us.
But we have grown older together. I don't feel the need to challenge this machine or the world in the way I think that I once did. It feels like a kind of awakening, where I can look around at other things and let them in.
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Those who know my work think of figures. It has been peopled by them entirely until now. I visited New Zealand and Australia last year and the result is that trees are replacing and joining the figures. The huge, ancient Kauri trees and the various eucalyptus and gum trees, seemed to 'people' that vast landscape: the scribbly gum where an insect has burrowed a channel on the trunk leaving what appears to be a line drawing; the dazzling white trunks against the intense blue sky. It is a conversation of line and light and colour. A conversation between perhaps a man and a tree. In essence the impetus is the same; an exploration of the rhythm and the relationship between a figure and/or tree and the space he occupies. It seems more interactive maybe, communicating with the environment rather than simply existing within it, even something bound up with ecological issues about the balance of living things, the consciousness that we cannot exist in a vacuum, that our lives are caught up in the interplay and communication of one life with another. There is no hierarchy.
I have visions of making a forest, people in trees, living with trees and being together with them. I saw an exhibition at the National Gallery of Australia in Canberra of aboriginal carved poles and didgeridoos. There were the extraordinary bark paintings too, with the distinctive crosshatched paintwork. My response has been to start to stitch with zigzag, a major step for me! And, of course, closer to home, there are the Newbury protesters, the tree people. I feel I am an observer attempting to express something that is universal and timeless.
I shall take a seed and plant
it upon a high and lofty mountain
It will grow and become a noble tree and bear much fruit.
You and the beasts will live in its shade and all the birds will nest in its
branches.
from the prophecy of Ezekiel.
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For the previous year or so, I had been working on a large installation for the Scottish Court Service in the High Court, Lawnmarket, Edinburgh. This piece is 4.5m high and consists of four panels. The figures are like splashes of colour on a canvas: on the left hand panel are 15 jury members, next a golden column with the judge in his distinctive red garment, then an abstract panel which picks up on the geometrical architecture of the atrium and, on the right, three figures gazing up to a sky blue space. These represent you and me, spectators coming in to view the theatre of the Court. They also view the ever changing spectacle of the blue sky which is ushered in. The panels are sculpted by means of hidden shaped wooden supports to form an undulating surface. Overriding concerns were to create a work of generous variety, to satisfy those working in the courts who would view it every day - and the undulating shapes give a shadow play through the day - and also to give a sense of hope or uplift, to attempt to hint at our aspirations and belief in human justice and compassion.
I continue to do other commissions alongside my own more speculative work. I am starting three altar frontals for Gloucester Cathedral and, growing out of my time spent in Australia, I am working on a large-scale landscape commission for a public building there.
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I have become more involved with the publishing of Telos textile art books by my husband, Matthew. Until recently, I have maintained a distance but have been drawn in by his vision to promote textiles and give them equal status and quality of coverage to fine art. My role has been helping with the graphic design on the computer! The objective of the series Art Textiles of the World is to form an international community of artists and a wider understanding of the medium. We take one book at a time, since each one is a huge financial risk. But the contact with such a variety of extraordinary work and artists is special, and definitely makes it worthwhile.
It seems like a very exciting time not just for me but in the textile world at large.
Following post graduate work at Goldsmith's,
Alice Kettle has worked on a number of prestigious commissions. This article introduces
her move from the figure studies with which she made her name.
Alice has a web site on www.telos.net/kettle
Photos by James Johnson.
This article is from The World of Embroidery, Volume 50 No.1, © Alice Kettle.
highlights from January 1999 issue