Anne Eggebert
Born 1958. Artist, living and working in east London. She was commissioned in 1998 with her partner and fellow artist, Julian Walker, to respond to Kettle's Yard as a home, which led to 'Mr and Mrs Walker have moved'. Eggebert and Walker moved in for 5 days and one night. Interviewed together with Walker, she describes some of the work created during the residency.
Interviewed: 2009-02-21By: Bettina Furnee, Robert Wilkinson
Length: 1 hour 34 mins
Media: On 4 tracks on CDs and summary
Interview id: MYKY32
Making artwork exploring Helen's role, part of residency in 1998
View: Transcript Theme: Helen Ede
It was a tree with a bough that's at 90 degrees to the trunk so you can sit on it, it would make a great space to hang a swing but it looks into Helen Ede's room. Helen would shut the door on that space when visitors came. Most people didn't know Jim Ede was married. I like the idea of somehow being inside Kettle's Yard but being outside Kettle's Yard at the same time, being part of it but removed from it, and so looking back into her room with binoculars - I spent my 40th birthday doing that and it's one of those pieces of work, I wasn't quite sure why I was doing it at the time but now it seems really pertinent and poignant in many ways... Because I was occupying Helen's space, that question of trying to be invisible in the space, I think, was something I was thinking about even more so, and certain things, like we were told that he used to deliberately... that she used to deliberately annoy Jim by leaving her knitting around and that kind of thing so we tried to play off with some of those issues because I could imagine he would have been quite difficult to live with.
Direct link to audio: .mp3
Difficulty claiming the space during the residency in 1998
View: Transcript Theme: House as gallery
[Eggebert]: It was about living in his artwork and disrupting it. It was also about the fear of breaking things or moving something out of place. For example, with the table, because we knew that in the kitchen there had been red gingham curtains and part of my activity there was to remake those curtains, we decided we'd get a red gingham plastic tablecloth, so it would go with the curtains in the kitchen and to have this over the table. So we did take the candlesticks and the other objects on the table off, and said 'well, we had to eat somewhere'. So we put this red gingham tablecloth... and one of the invigilators just couldn't bear this, it just horrified her, because that particular space is sort of a green, dark, soft space and the red just clashed. So there was something about the whole aesthetic encounter of the space. That was the kind of thing, that we were conscious of us, just physically, what we wore might clash or where we stood might disrupt the balance or where the cot was and so on.
[Walker]: That was very much the space where we took possession of the house every morning. Because, remember, we weren't staying overnight in the house most of the week so we'd get up, about 7 o'clock, and we'd walk to Kettle's Yard and we'd sit down then we'd take it over, in this almost ritualistic way really, and we'd have breakfast and Freddie [their son] would shout and want to get out... did he have a high chair? yeah... it would bring noise into the place, it would bring different colours into the place, it would bring probably the concept of youth into the house as well, of people of a younger age, into the space and using the space, because not many children go in there, it's one of those places where you can feel the fear and anxiety of parents as they take their children around the place that they're going to smash everything up. I didn't actually feel that worry about breakages because I don't have a problem with breakages which, you know, was actually part of the work that I did there, was breaking stuff up. Not in a, sort of, aggressive way but that was incidental to what I was doing there. But I did feel very much that I was an intruder.
Direct link to audio: .mp3
