Chance and Serendipity
Alice Kettle (right) presenting her talk at the Collect Craft Council Fair, Somerset House, London 2022.
There are many serendipitous moments in my life, where one thing leads to another. I find myself being curious about something which leads to a conversation and a “chance” discovery of an event I previously had no knowledge about.
This is what happened to me before I left for London. Somehow I discovered an online event about art and war hosted by arts patron and entrepreneur Isabelle Fish from Toronto. This really interested me so I got tickets and listened in at 5am in the morning to two women from Lebanon talking about what it is like living and making art in a country that has seen years of war and strife.
The gallery owner, Randa Missir was going to be showing the work of ceramicist Zein Daouk at the Collect craft fair in London. I would be able to go and see it. Zein described her work as a way to make sense of the world, to create a Kingdom of fungi with its own structure which she felt brought order to the world when all around was in turmoil.
I turned up at the Collect exhibition unsure of what I would be find. The first person I ran into was Isabelle quite by “chance”. She introduced me to another artist and this was the start of the serendipitous day….After meeting Randa “in the flesh” and marvelling at Zein’s wonderful ceramic fungi, I headed through the other exhibition rooms until I got to the stairs.
“Did you know there is a talk on in ten minutes” said a lady with a clipboard. Go down the stairs, it will be on soon. So I did, again not knowing what to expect. For an hour I was totally captivated by the eloquence of textile artist Alice Kettle talking about her work and the socio, political and personal stories behind each stitched piece.
One of the themes she kept returning to was the power of creativity to affect world change, by remaking the narrative through stitch and thread. Her visual stitched stories ranged from Greek mythology and the economic austerity protests in 2011, to the plight of refugees and included working with the embroiderers of Kandahar and Karachi.
Her large scale machine stitched works were powerful in scale and subject, filling entire barns and halls with narratives of resilience and hope, Kettle believed that “stitch is a way of conjoining, of making things better”.
“I see the world as a thread world, if everyone stitched then the world would be a better place”.
It was a timely reminder that war is once again happening somewhere in the world, this weekend exploding in the cities and streets of Ukraine. You can’t mend the world with bombs, you can mend with thread and stitching.
I was so glad I followed my intuition and went down those stairs to listen to this inspiring talk. At the end of it Kettle said “creativity can change the world”. I have to agree.
Alice Kettle. Queen Elizabeth, 2021. Thread on linen. 174 x 129 cm. On display at the Collect craft fair.
Me with Randa Missir and Zein Daouk’s ceramic Kingdom of Fungi at Collect fair.
