Written for the Ruthin Craft Centre touring exhibition catalogue, 2003
From there they could hear Circe within, singing in her beautiful voice as she went to and fro at her great and everlasting loom, on which she was weaving one of those delicate, graceful, and dazzling fabrics that goddesses love to make.
Homer ‘The Odyssey’, trans. EV Rieu (Penguin, 1946)
Even to those who don’t know Homer’s great poem The Odyssey itself, the characters are familiar, we absorb them through children’s stories, through references in literature, theatre and art, they are part of a shared symbolic order lodged deep in our collective culture: Circe, the goddess who turned the sailors into swine; the spaced-out Lotos eaters; the lumbering, terrifying Cyclops with its single eye; Scylla and Charybdis, the original ‘rock and a hard place’. The poem is rich in character, imagery and plot excitement: and, appropriately for Alice Kettle, textile references: Circe’s pastimes aside, for four years Odysseus’ loyal wife Penelope successfully put off unwelcome suitors with the conceit that she had to complete a great textile: a shroud for her father-in-law Laertes. ‘She prolonged her freedom to await her husband’s return by intensive and deceptive endeavour: ‘…by day she wove at the great web, but every night had torches set beside it and undid the work.’
The Odyssey provides appropriate material for Alice’s recent work for all these reasons and more. She is fascinated with myth and storytelling, and this story more than most allows for the exploration of emotional themes hung on an eventful epic narrative with enormous visual potential. Seeing the Victorian copy of the Bayeux Tapestry recently at Reading Museum strengthened her resolve to make a narrative work, gave her the confidence to attempt a complex story within a single piece, and influenced the format: unusually for Alice,Odyssey (2003) is a huge horizontal panel allowing for several scenes to be played out at once. It is epic, in a modern cinematic sense, its surface shimmering with movement. This main work is complemented by smaller satellite pieces depicting other scenes from the poem: the Lotos-Eaters; the goddess Calypso; the release of the Bag of Winds (all 2003). The texture and pace of Homer’s Odyssey is reflected in part in Alice’s textile: it is a dense physical substance, an intensely-worked fabric supporting narrative and particular incident. Homer’s Odyssey uses the full metaphorical force of the journey: as a means of self-discovery through the exploration of the other, a marrying of history with new experience. The intensity of painting with stitch is, for Alice, akin to a journey: a process which transports the imagination, requiring an intense mental and emotional engagement and a resolution of problems along the way. The Odyssey is on the one hand about retaining a sense of self, Odysseus resisting the temptations available on his journey. It is about being focussed on the main event, drawing from inner strength in the face of adversity.
Alice Kettle is an artist who has established a unique area of practice by her use of a craft medium, consistently and on an unparalleled scale. She has extended the possibilities of machine embroidery: producing works the size of tapestries, exploiting the textures and effects made possible through the harnessing of a mechanical process to intuitive, creative ends. The scale of her works belies their component parts: individual tiny stitches which combine to form great swathes of colour, painterly backgrounds incorporating rich hues and metallic sheen. Before her time at Goldsmiths’ Textile department, and while studying Fine Art at Reading, she began making non-figurative abstract expressionist paintings, influenced by visiting tutors Albert Irvin and Terry Frost. She has carried this bold confidence with colour and composition into her figurative works, and indeed at the stage of their construction before the figures are introduced, these might be large colour-field works, one panel of colour reacting with its neighbour in a vibrant expressive whole.
It is revealing, however, that her acknowledged influences are sculptural. Asked to name them, she recalls the effect of very particular pieces: Matisse’s studies of backs; and, in contrast, Flanagan’s hares for their levity, their vigour, their presence as drawings in space; Richard Long for his ‘virtuous putting together of materials’; Antony Gormley’s figure Sound II (1989) in the partially-flooded crypt of Winchester Cathedral, for its emotive use of human scale; a Henry Moore exhibition seen in the Museum of Modern Art in Greece, massive figurative forms displayed against the background of the sea; Epstein’s vast alabaster Jacob and the Angel, (“Wouldn’t it be wonderful to have a huge supporting angel like that?”). The real influence of these monumental figurative pieces is manifest in her latest works. Her earlier figures, such as Harlequin Madonna (1986) and Eve Falling from Grace (1986), occupy an ethereal space unaffected by gravity or the forces of their own weight: they adopt poses determined by the parameters of the textile edge, but float upon the background, merging with it like the figures in a Klimt painting, a mosaic of decorative marks. Her recent figures are more weighty, they look as if they occupy real space, they are grounded: the several figures in the Odyssey are more substantial, more believable, their features fully resolved. Whilst some are line drawings, some are heavily worked and reworked tonal renditions. This gives rhythm within the figures, establishes their relationships and helps distinguish the main protagonists in the narrative.
This body of work marks a return to classical themes following a series of prestigious ecclesiastical commissions through the 1990s. It is distinguished not only by a new confidence in depiction of the figure, but also by an enhanced relationship between painting and drawing through stitch. Of late her drawing has become more assertive, with a new assuredness of line as well as of mass. She speaks of the process of laying down colours as meditative, a partly detached state which controls and allows an outpouring of emotion: but this intense process is also all-consuming, noisy and physically very demanding due to the scale of the work being manipulated. Months of this concerted repetitive effort finally give way to the charge of excitement at suddenly changing pace: drawing with stitch is the climax of the creative process, a liberating release. Because of the thickness of the textile, its enormous bulk, and to achieve the stitch effects she desires, Alice frequently draws ‘blind’ from the back of the work, an edgy, risk-taking element. Like Penelope, she constructs and deconstructs, unafraid to cut through areas representing months of labour in order to reconfigure a work, to erase and occasionally unpick stitched line and to redraw repeatedly. But traces remain: the evidence of these layers of thinking is apparent in the finished work, showing that meaning lies not only in the product but in the process.
The tension inherent in their surfaces and their own weight cause her textiles to take up wavy forms, and Alice has always has always been interested in the way that this gives objects which are obviously hangings an animated relationship with the wall. She first exaggerated this natural consequence of her technique in Creation (1991): it is suspended from shaped profiles on the wall which bulk out the panels and emphasise their columnar shape. Creation is an image of humanity in its nascent, purest form. Calm, filled with light, it celebrates the pure potential of human life.Towers (2002) marks the other end of the scale, a work made in shocked reaction to the events of September 11 2001. It is document of human suffering, a man-made disaster of previously unimagined proportion: one panel of the triptych has seemingly collapsed, its mass falling in great folds onto the floor. This very physical aspect of her work is now being even more closely linked with the subject matter it describes. In the Odyssey series, Scylla and Charybdis (2003) are columnar and pool-like respectively, the distorted features of drowning sailors crumpled and redrawn on the peaks of textile waves, their misery drawn in deep relief.
Alice has found, in The Odyssey, a bountiful seam of material with which to work: it is rich visual territory; it deals with grand themes; it is about longing and searching; it is expressive of so many human truths. Her Odyssey is ambitious both in its scale and its range, an epic work peopled by fully-developed interacting characters. It would have made an extraordinary painting, but the fact of its rich, dense fabric further emphasises its power and substance. Appropriately, Homer’s Odyssey supports not only a hero in Odysseus, retaining his primary objective throughout a long and eventful journey; but also a powerful heroine, Penelope, whose outward vulnerability belies great strength, and who keeps faith by weaving and unweaving.
June 2003
sara roberts 