Hilary Gresty
Born 1954. Curator at Kettle's Yard from 1983-89. Had worked at Windsor Castle and the Tate Gallery before then as a librarian. Had visited Kettle's Yard in the late 1970s and was impressed with what she saw. Hilary was appointed Assistant Curator at Kettle's Yard but within a few months, she took on the Curator post, following Jeremy Lewison's departure for a post at the Tate Gallery (the Curator and Asst Curator posts were funded by an endowment from Jim Ede).
Hilary developed the cataloging of objects in the house and extended the programme of activities and exhibitions. Hilary regularly visited Jim Ede in Edinburgh. She is still unsure whether he appreciated the appointment of a woman to the post of Curator. In her interview, she describes the dilemmas of the house, particularly the inability to change and move objects around, but she has a lot of respect for Jim Ede's vision.
At the time of interview she was a freelance curator and writer living in Cambridgeshire.
By: Robert Wilkinson
Length: 1 hour 47 mins
Media: On 2 tracks on CD with summary and partial transcript
Interview id: MYKY21
Potential futures for Kettle's Yard in the mid 1980s
View: Transcript Theme: House as gallery
This whole tussle between, you know, should the collection grow or should the collection stay static and to what extent should works be added? There were some particular works that were wanted to be donated to Kettle's Yard and I think work came about through Alan Bowness really and, you know, how you integrate... I think this donation in the end ended up in Helen's bathroom so it didn't actually disrupt the... but I think that represented one of the dilemmas for Kettle's Yard and I remember at the time suggesting to the committee, though I didn't really have the experience or the drive to take it through, that maybe one way round this was to actually create Kettle's Yard as a centre, a sort of archival centre for, you know, English... St Ives School and the artists around and that funding maybe could be found to build it up as a proper centre of excellence for that. You know, that did seem one way round trying to preserve the holistic nature of what existed at Kettle's Yard but actually also keep it alive and keep the intellectual understanding and the historical knowledge around it going. How do you keep it alive and make it relevant without destroying it?
Direct link to audio: .mp3
Music at Kettle's Yard, 1983-89
View: Transcript Theme: Music
Yes, the music programme was very established. It was funded slightly differently, I can't remember now, I think its funding came through... it was dedicated funding. It had a very loyal and strong cohort of subscribers, you know, people who came to the concerts. Some of them were very, very old, I do remember this. One or two, I used to think they wouldn't get in and out of the door, you know, people in their late nineties who'd have to have special chairs with lots of cushions and you know... It was run by a lady called Diana who used to come down from London. Diana used to stay overnight in the bedroom and burn her toast in the morning and set the alarms off. You know, the music audience and the art audience seemed to be very different. It certainly wasn't what you'd call open access or encouraging people to come who wouldn't see it as their first and immediate priority. There was no sense of trying to broaden the audience.
Direct link to audio: .mp3
John Cage exhibited in 1984 and met with Jim in Edinburgh
View: Transcript Theme: House as gallery
I felt that part of the Arts Council money there was to broaden the audience for contemporary art and one of the ways of doing that was to make the links in the programming with the house and so we did try to programme things... sometimes inviting artists to make work in response to the house or programming things that seemed to chime with the house. One of the very first exhibitions that I programmed was an exhibition of drawings by John Cage, which seemed to fit very much the ethos of the house and in fact when the show went up to Edinburgh, John Cage did actually go and meet Jim Ede. I think it was perhaps not the meeting of like-minded individuals that one might have seen, but perhaps exposed the differences between two men that might believe in the beauty of silence or the meanings of silence but actually from very different perspectives. One being a rather, sort of, lively American seventy-year-old with a very active brain and very focussed on the experimental and Jim perhaps focussed very much on something that was more reflective.
Direct link to audio: .mp3
