The worlds of engineering and art have been brought together following a new commission for Manchester School of Art professor Alice Kettle.
Alice, one of the foremost exponents of modern embroidery, has been commissioned by Lloyd’s Register to create a new artwork which has been installed at the Global Technology Centre in Southampton. The Centre will be officially opened by Princess Anne later this month.
A Map to the Future is an eight by three metre embroidery marrying the skill of ‘painting with thread’ – the craft of free machine embroidery – with contemporary, digital stitching. These techniques mirror Lloyd’s Register’s journey from being the original maritime classification society in a pre-industrial age, to today’s multi-stranded, global, technology-driven organisation, owned by one of Britain’s biggest charities.
The embroidery is a unique, magnificent image of the world which incorporates Lloyd’s Register iconography along the currents of the oceans and nestling on the land at the edges of the seas. Over the year it has taken to conceive and create, Alice has crafted a monumental, richly detailed and layered work of art.
Alice is recognised for her painterly quality and scale of her stitch-work, and the piece marks a significant evolution in this rare medium. With the effect of a watercolour painting, it is scattered with an intensity of detail and has a new found delicacy. This new development in her work creates a pictorial depth much, perhaps, like looking into the sea down the freeboard of a ship.
As the viewer looks across the image there is also a sense of light and dark reflecting the reality that any time around the world it is both day and night.
Speaking about the project and of the finished art work, Alice said how the symbolism works on many levels: “The threads literally stitch together a world and recreate symbols of LR’s past that suggests how we can think about the future. You can never arrive at the future, so in looking back we might be able to think about how it feels to look forward.”
Nick Brown, Brand & External Relations Manager at Lloyd’s Register, said: “Alice’s incredible work is a dramatic counterpoint to the streamlined minimalism of the GTC. You have to see it to really grasp its impact. Having Alice working here has been special.
“Working on the embroidery in our reception area this year – where the embroidery now hangs – she has become part of our working day, hearing about the work, lives and interests of LR’s people. The development of the embroidery has been heavily influenced by this contact as much as by our initial brief and Alice’s awareness of LR’s origins and history. And, given the medium and the scale, A Map to the Future is a physical achievement in its own right.”
