Alice Kettle

Conversations & Collaborations’
April 28 –May 27 2012
Museum in the Park
GL5 4AF

Images of new collaborative work with Jane Webb and David Gates

Alice Kettle November 2011

Pairings II Conversations and Collaborations is a simple thought; to celebrate uniqueness and togetherness. The intention is to celebrate making and makers and engage with another to learn and understand more.

This exhibition brings together partnerships of makers to discuss and share the experience of making. Collaboration raises questions about ownership, it tests recognised working methods and negotiates how voices resonate and sing together. It is the evidence of this dialogue between makers which has given birth to work and ideas that redefine the nature of the object and of craft. The subsequent artefact or collection of pieces, combine a marriage or parallel exploration of materials, of practices and creative identities.

The exhibition places makers and designers together in pairs or in threesomes. Each participant has a distinct and established area of their own practice which they have shared with another maker in order to have an experience of a different material, a new process and an exchange of ideas. The exhibition will show the evidence of these playful duets and trios and the in between conversations, where materials and methods are questioned or where different approaches are placed together in reflection or contradiction. The show will demonstrate intriguing combinations which challenge our notions of creative identity and ownership.

The participants come from a variety of material backgrounds. This newly commissioned exhibition by Stroud International Textile Festival develops new working  partnerships with at least one maker working with textiles. Other works are selected from the ‘Pairings’ collaborative project originally initiated in 2009 at Manchester Metropolitan University and the ‘Stitching and Thinking Group’ at University of the West of England.

Glass is pinned into felt, ceramics are stitched, and objects are woven. These cross fertilisations of voice and material may be a temporary shift of direction and a testing of other skills which can impact more permanently on individual practice. The courage of the makers to expose and expand their working methods must be acknowledged as they search for new territories which are joined and connected materially. With their companion they have talked and critiqued each other’s work with new understandings of common ground. Ismini Samanidiou and Sharon Blakey describe their experience as ‘like a whirlwind romance: a passionate affair of fleeting encounters and intense assignations.’ But one which,’ revealed a deeply rooted, mutual aesthetic in the impermanence and beauty of the everyday and evidence of the transitory.’ 1

Some have found possibilities in new technologies and in alternative processes and tools. They have applied these new discoveries to their own material. Stephen Dixon and Jessamy Kelly describe making new ‘treasures’.  Duncan Ayscough and Heather Belcher discovered a ‘shared passion for material, process and words’  and an ‘opportunity for me to step outside my own, focused, practice and to share my discipline whilst obtaining valuable and inspiring insights into a new material.’2

As Claire Curneen puts it: a simple thought can lead to, ‘a simple conversation with a like-minded stranger,’ which ‘ can produce some unexpected ideas.’3

1.              Gröppel-Wegener, A. (2010) Pairings: exploring collaborative creative practice. Manchester Metropolitan University: The Pairings Project/Blurb 2010. P58

2.              As above . P.94

3.              As above. P.10

Exhibition with Alice Kettle & Jules Findley

Chichester Cathedral  18.2.2012 – 29.3.2012

A project which explores issues of loss.

The project focuses on personal loss and the wider context of loss reflecting social political agendas.
The work developed explores notions of the loss of the hand-made alongside the emergence of the digital. Working with industry major artworks have been produced which research the expressive potential of digital stitch outside of the production bias.

Paradise Lost
looks at loss of landscape and life in response to the Japanese Tsunami 2011 and the subsequent nuclear catastrophe 2011.
It is a work in homage to those who lost their lives.
Beyond this immediate event the work makes reference to Milton’s epic narrative poem Paradise Lost. The poem’s central theme surrounds the fall of Adam and Eve, and examines its cause and the possibility of redemption. ‘Felix culpa’ or fortunate fall expresses optimism, the emergence into a better place as a consequence of the fall, through God’s mercy and the birth of Christ.
The background of the stitched piece echoes Piero della Francesca’s ‘Nativity’ in the National Gallery. In this case what was an italianate landscape has become industrial and radiation damaged. What should be the angels are a group of children mutated by the impact of exposure.

Homage to Guernica
looks at war and the consequent loss of life. The work looks ate the shift of perspective from horizontal to the vertical as with Picasso’s Guernicca which contains symbols which change form a different perspective. The association is that war is a matter in part of perspective which can changed and shifted through attitude. If not the consequence is powerfully destructive. The simple device of change from vertical to horizontal and vice versa is used to denote life, and death.

Alice Kettle & Pushpa Kumari

India Residency

1. 7. 2011 – 14 .7.2011 Arts Reverie In Ahmedebad India with Pushpa Kumari.

As part A Fine Line’s ongoing ‘Craft (Made in India): Who Cares?’ and MIRIAD Manchester School of Art.

Pushpa Kumari and Alice Kettle spent time together at Arts Reverie Ahmedebad in 2011. Pushpa will return to Manchester in 2012 to continue their collaboration. They spent 10 days drawing together. Without a common language and with the monsoon breaking around them, the drawn line became their method of communication. Pushpa introduced Alice to Madhubani techniques. They drew with a length of cotton dipped into ink and dragged across the paper to build up marks and pattern. These shared drawings became the conversations between them which Alice then developed into a stitch response on her return to UK.

These are being exhibited consecutively in Manchester  for the Manchester Asian Arts Festival and at Arts Reverie in Ahmedebad International Arts Festival.

I look out of the window straight into the marooned interior of the house next door. My face is aligned with a dirty child smiling in the arms of a tiny sister. I am a white curiosity in the middle of the brown monsoon – a perpetual rain wall clattering drenching and burning acid. It soaks and smells and never stops. My noisy sanctuary is a weeping house of reveries in Ahmedebad. It creaks and swells in the rain, sighing and moaning as the gushes of water stream through its hot cracks.

My limbs are tired and dry and swollen too. I stretch my fingers and ease my cramped knees. Today, yesterday and the day before, I have sat stacking day upon day, upon day. I draw a fine sari thread through ink and drag its seeping black onto paper into eddies of cross hatch.

Pushpa Kumari is drawing near me. We talk in lines, our only common language. She tells me of the circling paisley, the dancing rituals, the singing bells, the deep sand temples filled with lotus flowers, the chattering monkeys and the songbirds.  I see the Maharaja, the block printed and shiboried cloths with woven brocade gold and gemstone bangles. King Dambh’s wife and her shell child Shankhchud, Brahma and the Badri jungles with the River Gandhaki flowing from Lord Shankar’s hennared hand. There are the embroidered banners, silk mashru and fine indigo patola. She draws the lineage of madhubani painting passed from her grandmother Maha Sundari Devi to mother to daughter in the intricate chronology of tradition. Her line circumnavigates the generations as she describes the indigenous histories of her ancestors, the symbols of her native landscape in repeated motif and ornament.

I am humbled by her lines of enchantment. They lead me away from my awkward colonialist associations and coax me from stilted corners into fluid curves. I look out and see an interconnected patterned world of triangular mobile phone masts and complex grids of telegraph poles, cables, sewage pipes with valves and turns and circular pleats and rows of buzzing pylons. There is sparkling paper, plastic rubbish piled on stippled earth.

I see the rain. I see the drops and pools as it washes and cleans.

Pushpa Kumari and I smile. I see the lines of laughter as white blackened fingers draw nearer to brown.

The residency was followed by 2 exhibitions;

Arts Reverie, Ahemedebad,  India  13. 10. 2011 – 16.10.2011

http://aiaf.in/ahmedabad.htm

 MANCHESTER ASIAN FESTIVAL

‘Drawing the Line, Extending the Line’

http://www.asiatriennialmanchester.com/

The Holden Gallery, Manchester

28.10.11 – 25.11.11

Open Monday – Friday 10am – 4pm

http://www.holdengallery.mmu.ac.uk/

Drawing the Line exhibits the work of Manisha Parekh and Pushpa Kumari, two artists, whose individual works on paper offer each artist’s contemporary interpretation of traditional practice and encapsulate the tensions and powerful productivity of Indian contemporary art in the 21st century.

Extending the Line presents new works by Alice Kettle and Lin Holland made in response to their experiences in India during collaborative residencies with Manisha Parekh and Pushpa Kumari

'Cirrus Nebulus' by Alice Kettle and Lydia Southwell

Installation at the Theatre Royal Winchester, 31.10.11 as part of Map Plot Plunder, 10 Days in the City

http://umbrellawinchester.ning.com/?xg_source=msg_mes_network