Embroiderer’s work has common threads

‘Make’, a symposium on ‘making’ in art, technology and science, is at the CIT Cork School of Music on March 7.

One of the keynote speakers is embroiderer Alice Kettle. Based in Winchester, Kettle is a senior research fellow at Manchester School of Art. She exhibits her large-scale works of stitch internationally. She did a mammoth work for Winchester Discovery Centre in 2007.

Kettle will speak about her craft and technology and how artists communicate with audiences. “For me, that involves using threads to make pictures which tell stories. My work is all done on a sewing machine. Recently, I started using a lot of combined technologies, using sewing machines that are digital. That means I can do a drawing, scan it into the machine, and change it into a stitch using embroidery software. You can repeat an image, which you can’t do with a normal sewing machine. You can change the scale and you can change the original image, in the same way as you can with other graphic and artistic practices,” she says.