Lumpy, bulgy, human: Threads, at Arnolfini Bristol, reviewed

Trophy office blocks designed as landmarks are not welcoming to humans; their glass and steel reception areas feel more suited to robots. But this summer the cavernous lobbies of two City buildings – 99 Bishopsgate and 30 Fenchurch Street – have been humanised by To Boldly Sew, an exhibition of wall hangings by the winner of this year’s Brookfield Properties Crafts Award, Alice Kettle.

As the owners of Renaissance palazzi and Jacobean mansions understood, wall hangings bring warmth and colour to a cold interior: once more prized than paintings, they doubled as decorations and draught excluders. Now, dignified with the name of ‘fibre arts’, fabrics are back in the fine-art fold and most of the artists working with them are women.

Time was when every girl knew how to sew, before fast fashion and Ikea curtains. Alice Kettle grew up in an old-fashioned household where ‘the sewing machine was always out’ and, after studying painting under Terry Frost at Reading, she returned to her first love: thread. Astonishingly, her embroidered hangings are made on a sewing machine from which she conjures marks as fluid as brushstrokes – in a film of her in action, the sinuous figure of a swimmer emerges magically from under a clattering needle as she pushes a swathe of fabric back and forth.

Shoals of these brightly coloured swimmers ply the waves of her eight metre wall hanging ‘Sea’ (2018) in Bishopsgate, while a procession of planes crosses the skies of ‘Flightlines’ (2022) in Fenchurch Street. Her images describe a world in flux. The colours and textures are rich – there’s plenty of gold thread – but the drawing is naive: it’s ‘raw art’ tapestry with an opulent touch. Her compositions, she admits, are ‘very unstructured’; like the stories, mythological or topical, that inspire them they follow ‘a fluid process of development’.

‘Sea’ is a companion piece to ‘Ground’ (2018), the hanging greeting visitors to Threads: ‘Breathing Stories into Materials’, the new exhibition Kettle has co-curated at the Arnolfini Bristol: both were made for her 2018 Whitworth Gallery exhibition Thread Bearing Witness and incorporate drawings by refugees.