Alice E. Knowles

Alice E. Knowles (1900-1970) was a craftswoman who worked primarily in embroidery in the first half of the twentieth century in Adelaide. Born in 1900 in Rosedale in the Barossa Valley she attended school in Murray Bridge.  Not much is known about her training in art and craft, but it is likely she received informal training in needlework as well as other craft-based technical skills. She worked for a time at John Martin & Co. Ltd, department store in the embroidery department where she worked textiles for trousseaus for well-off clients.

Alice E. Knowles was a prolific, expert embroiderer who exhibited widely in Adelaide from the 1930s through to the late 1960s largely as a fundraising activity for charitable and religious organisations. She was a longstanding member of the South Australian Country Women’s Association as well as the Red Cross where she taught embroidery techniques and made work for exhibition. From 1938 she was a judge of handicrafts section at the Royal Adelaide Show, her family initiated a prize in her memory after her death in 1970. Alice E. Knowles exhibition internationally, including at several Los Angeles County Fairs, United States of America, in the 1950s and as part of an international exhibition of embroidery held in Edinburgh in 1960, an initiative of the Embroiderers Guild, United Kingdom.  In 1973, her brother gifted 27 items by the craftswoman to the Art Gallery of South Australia.

Rebecca Evans, Curator of Decorative Arts & Design

REF: 

Art Gallery of South Australia, Acquisition file, file note AC2/206.

Email correspondence with Robyn Stewart, Archivist, The South Australian Country Women's Association Inc. 17th July 2025.