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...

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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.