plants
Plants were a valued part of Kettle's Yard for Jim
Stephen Bann
Transcript
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.
Placing objects and the impossibility of keeping Jim's version
Mike Tooby
Transcript
We did occasionally lend to other exhibitions of course so that would require re-thinking a space and then on the level of the none art, as it were, the pebbles, feathers - damage, loss - would require re-thinking. Sometimes we ran this past Jim, other times we just did it and told him, other times we just did it and didn't tell him. But there would be a process of debate, I think, and Jeremy had a different kind of passion to me about the need for it to be just so. We, probably like a lot of people very intimate with Kettle's Yard, we probably each had our own idea of what that meant and that's where the analogy I was meaning about the performance of the piece of music comes in. Let's take the spiral as the best example, or the dark to light pebbles. We would constantly remake that. And then the precise nuance of the relationship between that and that and that, whatever it might be, might be just slightly different. Another would be the angle of the Hamilton Finlay in the plants area. And of course the fact that the plants changed. I remember a huge schmozzle about the dizygotheca down below by the piano in the lower area and the Buddha. Because of course the dizygotheca covered the Buddha and the Buddha sat under the tree but eventually this thing became too big, it grows, you know, plants grow! So how high this should... and Gerard Hemsworth of all people, he was in a show that I curated, and he got really interested in Kettle's Yard and he offered to find a dizygotheca of the right height. So, in other words, you might be passionate about exactly where it was, whatever it might be or what you'd got to know, but of course the irony was that it could never be exactly that.






