This afternoon we have had a wonderful lecture by textiles artist, Alice Kettle, entitled 'The Transformative Power of Thread'. She spent the time talking to us about her own practice, inspirations and truly inspiring stories of the industry that she has managed to get in to.
Alice's work is from an embroidery based practice, and it is obvious how passionate she is about the material, with her opening sentence entailing "Thread is what keeps me going". Her pieces are all one offs, using free-machine embroidery (which is pretty inspiring as I have been inducted on the Irish machines this morning!) and a combination of old fabrics/ found materials. Each piece of her work has a story behind it- be it an inspirational piece of writing, poetry or many other examples.
Her use of thread is incredible, especially the amounts that are used to create her extra large scaled pieces- at the moment I can only dream of producing metres of free-machine work, however I know that I will most definitely do anything I can to be doing the same as Alice one day....
