Look Closer: Kerry Inkster’s Studies in Thread

Something keeps happening at KAB Gallery Terrigal this week. A visitor walks past a small framed work, glances at it, and keeps going.

Then they stop, come back, and lean in, closer and closer, until they realise it isn’t a painting at all. Every line in Kerry Inkster’s studies in thread is a tiny hand stitch, sewn through paper over a soft wash of colour. There are thousands of them in each work, and once you have seen them, it is hard to stop looking.

Stitch by stitch

Kerry Inkster is well known for her Women Underwater series, the paintings and photographs of women floating and swimming through water that she has been creating since 2014. In these works she takes the same weightless figures and rebuilds them by hand. A gentle wash of colour goes down first, and then the needle takes over. Blues and violets become the water, turquoise and coral catch the light, and white and cream thread shapes skin and the shimmer of the surface. Look closely and you can see every needle hole in the paper, a quiet record of each decision she made.

Kerry counts Georges Seurat among her influences, and the connection is easy to see. Like his tiny dots of paint, her stitches sit side by side in separate colours, and it is your eye that blends them into water, light and movement. Stand back and you see a swimmer. Step closer and you see the thread. It is why visitors keep moving back and forth in front of them.

The women who came before her

Kerry Inkster credits the women in her family, who were fashion designers and tailors, with shaping her eye. Their creativity, she says, was never “formalised as ‘art’”, yet it shaped her artistic sensibilities from a young age. Looking at these works, it is hard not to see that thread running through: a contemporary artist picking up the tools of the women before her to tell stories about women today.

There is something quietly defiant about them too. As AI-generated images fill our screens, Kerry has chosen to make her work more textural and more obviously human.

“I believe that creating something that is obviously handmade will help combat the digitally made artwork that is flowing heavily into the art world.”

No machine made these, just a needle, thread and many patient hours. Handmade is the new luxury, and AI could never create what Kerry Inkster does.

The studies in thread

When the heart is happy

She is the candle flame above water – Study in thread

Hawaiian Island Doll

Had I the Heaven’s Embroidered Cloth – Study in Thread

You can also read about her Ukiyo-e-inspired panels in Pictures of the Floating World: Kerry Inkster’s Women Underwater Meet Hokusai, and join our VIP mailing list to be the first to see what she makes next.

Pictures of the Floating World: Kerry Inkster’s Women Underwater Meet Hokusai

About the author

Kerry-Anne Blanket

Director & Curator - KAB Gallery

KAB Gallery’s Kerry-Anne Blanket holds a Bachelor of Visual Arts and two Masters degrees (Hons) from the University of Sydney. With an extensive career in art education along with the management of museums and investment art galleries, Kerry-Anne can offer premier art consulting to her clients and source specially requested works. 

She has a keen eye for detail, comprehensive art market knowledge and a love of all things beautiful. Kerry-Anne works directly with artists and collectors alike to curate interesting and eclectic exhibitions.