Circadian Threads

6 June - 25 July 2026

Opening:
5 June 2026, 6-8pm

Turn­ing to textiles during her time at Goldsmiths College in London, Alice Kettle extends Britain’s long tradition of narrative textiles — from the 11th-cen­tu­ry Bayeux Tapestry to gen­erations of women who have stitched and continue to stich personal histories, emo­tions, and acts of care into cloth. Transforming embroidery into a richly expansive contemporary language, Kettle reclaims a medium historically associated with feminine craft and under­valued women’s work, using thread as a means of thinking through material, memory, and human connection, reflecting the instability and fluidity of contemporary life while at­tempting to evoke a sense of unity.

Emerging and dissolving within radiant layers of thread, Kettle’s embroidered figures in­habit states of continual be­coming, reflecting identities shaped through movement, en­counter, and transformation ra­ther than fixed definition. Her dense accumulations of stitch often resemble painterly brushstrokes, building luminous surfaces in which form flickers between presence and disappearance. Her work, however, em­braces uncertainty not as absence, but as a fertile and creative condition — one that al­lows space for adaptation, re­invention, and new ways of relating to others and the world around us. 

The looping, dynamic energy of her stitched lines mirrors the entangled rhythms of con­tem­porary existence, where personal, social, and environmental realities constantly over­lap. Within these densely worked surfaces, thread becomes both material and metaphor: fragile yet resilient, intimate yet connective. Kettle’s material storytelling map networks of memory, sen­sation, and experience, suggesting lives woven together through acts of care, imagination, and ex­change.

The cyclical rhythms evoked in Circadian Threads — sleep and waking, stillness and move­ment, consciousness and dream — further situate the body within larger temporal and eco­logical systems. Rather than following a linear progression, her works unfold through repe­ti­tion, return, and transformation, emphasizing continuity and interdependence. Embroi­dery here becomes a living structure through which emotional, psychological, and collec­tive ex­periences are held in tension.

This sense of transformation connects closely to the surrealist tradition, particularly the work of female surrealists such as Leonora Carrington and Dorothea Tanning, who ex­plored the porous boundaries between inner and outer worlds, dream and reality, self and alter ego. It also recalls the late fabric works of Louise Bourgeois, whose sewn figures and fragmented bodies gave form to memory, vulnerability, and psychic intensity through cloth. Among contemporary artists, Kettle’s practice resonates with Ghada Amer’s subver­sive use of embroidery to challenge distinctions between fine art and women’s labour, Kiki Smith’s mythic and mutable explorations of the body, and Tracey Emin’s intimate, emo­tionally charged stitched works.

Amid all this, Kettle’s vivid narratives tell of her own encounters, of transformative experi­ences and the continual process of growth, renewal, change, decay, and the counterpoints of tragedy and hope, while the re­petitive act of stitching becomes both a form of contem­plation and a physical inscription of time, labour, attention, and embodied experience into the surface of the work.

Circadian Threads is Alice Kettle’s first exhibition with Anna Helwing and her first solo presentation in Switzerland ever. Kettle was born in 1961 and lives and works in Somerset, UK. She studied Fine Art Painting at the University of Reading and received her Postgradu­ate Diploma in Textile Art with special commendation from Goldsmiths College. Her work is included in many international public collec­tions in­cluding the Crafts Council, the Whit­worth Manchester University, Liverpool International Slav­ery Mu­seum, Museum of Decora­tive Art and Design, Riga, Latvia, FAMM Museum Mougins, the Belger Collection, Kansas City USA. She is Emeritus Professor of Textile Arts at Manchester School of Art, Manchester Metropolitan University and has co-authored and edited various publications including Ma­chine Stitch Perspectives, Hand Stitch Perspec­tives, with Jane Mckeating Collaboration through Craft with Amanda Ravtez and Helen Felcey, and The Erotic Cloth, Reading the Thread: Cloth and Communication, with Lesley Millar, all with Bloomsbury.

Artist website