Stephen Bann
Born 1942. First encountered Kettle's Yard in 1960/1 whilst an undergraduate at King's College, University of Cambridge. He remembers the tea ritual which would be ended by Jim Ede ringing the Angelus at St Peter's Church. After Cambridge Stephen taught history at the University of Kent where he curated an exhibition of Henri Gaudier-Brzeska drawings. He kept in touch with Jim when he moved to Edinburgh. At the time of interview he was Emeritus Professor of Art History at the University of Bristol.
Interviewed: 2009-08-10By: Robert Wilkinson
Length: 1 hour 41 mins
Media: On 1 CD, two tracks
Interview id: MYKY43
Plants were a valued part of Kettle's Yard for Jim
View: Transcript Theme: House as artwork
Kettle's Yard - a place where you see art, in that sense, is not just an arbitrary arrangement, it's a place of very precise relationships and of course in Jim's case, as it wasn't a classic hang, it wasn't simply pictures on the wall or indeed sculptures in three dimensions, it was all kinds of relationships, of small objects, pebbles and so on, which were integral but at the same time, somebody who didn't quite know why they were there might easily think they could be cleared away or at least moved. It wasn't simply mineral objects, as it were, or artistic entities, it was also plants. I can remember at one stage I actually gave him a maidenhair fern in a pot, I think either in return for him lending me something or for some sort of favour at any rate, and it was astonishing because each time I went, I suppose six months later or a few month after that, he would say, "Your maidenhair fern is doing very well", and he would show me where it was and of course it had given realise to several other cuttings and so on... This plant life was evidently an evanescent feature of Kettle's Yard but a very necessary one.
Direct link to audio: .mp3
