Alice Kettle: Balancing Act at Bo Lee Gallery
At Bo Lee Gallery in Bruton, Somerset, Alice Kettle’s exhibition Balancing Act brings thread into sharp focus as both material and metaphor. Running from 7 February to 11 April 2026, the show presents a new body of work that explores the tensions between stability and precarity, stillness and movement, catastrophe and hope.
Kettle’s practice has long centred on the expressive potential of stitch, and here thread becomes a means of articulating lived experience. Through layered, densely worked surfaces, her textiles give form to everyday human sensations, interweaving the archetypal and the personal with contemporary realities. As Anni Albers once observed, “to make life visible and tangible, we need light and material”; in Kettle’s hands, thread becomes precisely that—both a physical substance and a carrier of emotional weight.
Alice Kettle, Balancing Act (detail), 2026. Image courtesy of Bo Lee Gallery
Figures recur throughout Balancing Act, caught mid-action: throwing and catching, pushing and pulling. Threads are pulled taut, allowed to tangle, or left drifting, sometimes anchoring the surface, at others lifting away from it. Lines of colour twist and collide, creating a visual language that speaks of effort, strain and release. These shifting states act as a metaphor for the continual negotiation between opposing forces that characterise human experience. Rupture and renewal sit side by side, held in a constant state of suspension.
Alice Kettle, Spinning Plates, Do Not Drop Them, 2026. Image courtesy of Bo Lee Gallery
Kettle describes this space as one in which “between suffering and joy, power and powerlessness, we search for equilibrium.” The connection of one thread to another becomes a way of thinking through how individuals exist within a wider material and emotional world. Stitch, here, is not decorative but structural: it binds, supports, resists and, at times, threatens to unravel.
Alice Kettle, Don't Look Back, 2026. Image courtesy of Bo Lee Gallery.
An internationally renowned figure in contemporary textile art, Alice Kettle is known for her figurative stitched works that range from the intimate to the monumental. Trained originally as a painter, she makes full use of the textures and effects made possible through mechanical stitch, combining careful planning with intuitive decision-making. Stories drawn from autobiography, folklore, mythology and current events collide across her surfaces, built up from countless tiny stitches that together form painterly expanses of colour and metallic sheen.
Alice Kettle, Catching the Weeping Moon, 2026. Image courtesy of Bo Lee Gallery.
“When stitching you are always doing two things at the same time,” Kettle notes. “You are drawing a descriptive, linear line, but it is also a three-dimensional thread in tension that joins things together.” This duality—line and structure, image and connection—sits at the heart of Balancing Act.
Kettle’s work is held in major international public collections, including the Crafts Council, the Whitworth, Liverpool International Slavery Museum and the Museum of Decorative Art and Design in Riga. An Emeritus Professor of Textile Arts at Manchester School of Art, she has also authored and edited key texts on contemporary stitch. At Bo Lee Gallery, her latest works offer a powerful meditation on balance, vulnerability and the fragile threads that hold us together.
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Image Credits:
Lead: Alice Kettle, Catch Me if you Can (detail), 2026. Various threads on printed linen mix. Courtesy Alice Kettle and Bo Lee gallery.
All further images as credited in photo captions.