Alice Kettle

Professor of Textile Arts, Manchester School of Art, Manchester Metropolitan University, UK

Alice Kettle’s monumental figurative stitched works, describe the challenges and ambitions of the human condition by colliding the autobiographical and contemporary event with folklore and mythology. Her artistic work is represented in many international public collections. Her major exhibition Thread Bearing Witness (2018) at the Whitworth Art Gallery used stitch to address issues of migration and people displacement. She co-curated Fabric; Cloth and Identity at Compton Verney Art Gallery (2019), Threads-Breathing Stories into Materials at the Arnolfini in Bristol (2023) Soft Power, lives told through Textile Art at the RWA Bristol (2025). She received the Brookfield Properties/Crafts Council award with accompanying exhibition To Boldy Sew (2023) for her international contribution to material/craft practice. She is Professor of Textile Arts at Manchester School of Art, Manchester Metropolitan University. She has an enduring interest in collaborative work and empowering marginalized communities through creative means. She has co-authored various publications including Machine Stitch Perspectives, Hand Stitch Perspectives, Collaboration through Craft, The Erotic Cloth and Reading the Thread: cloth and communication with Bloomsbury.

Alice Kettle, “Thread World”

Textiles, the use and production of cloth, tell the story of the everyday, of histories and of social and political structures. Textiles speak about lives through their formal qualities, their material substance, and their social context. These textile stories describe identity, cross-cultural encounters, spaces in which we can imagine who we are, who we want to be, and how we relate to others. They transmit the transformative potential of making, of emancipation and invention. They access enduring traditional stories with universal themes which carry powerful contemporary relevance. As an artist storyteller I create a threadworld. It is a space entered through the process of making which enables movement back and forth between metaphor as a creative impulse and concrete realization as the work takes shape and where identities can be reinforced and formed.