Alice Kettle

The Transformative Power of Thread

Today we had a guest lecturer, Textiles Practitioner Alice Kettle. Alice specialises in embroidery which is not something I am overly keen on personally so I felt that the lecture was not very relevant to myself. However she did speak a lot about getting commissions and being a freelancer so it did give me an insight into a possible career path I could take in the future.

Alice takes inspiration from stories that she feels relate to her life somehow or that have thread involved within them. I find her way of finding inspiration quite interesting as I have not heard of anything like that before. Her commissions are on rather large scales such as 16 metre embroidered images. Something I did find interesting in the lecture was when she collaborated with Pushpa Kumari and they began to draw by using a single thread dipped in ink to create line. I may try to use this technique to experiment more and to see what effects I could get with this technique.