knitting
Helen - "I cannot put my knitting down anywhere"
Simon Barrington Ward
Transcript
I always remember Helen having a slightly sceptical attitude at times towards parts of the Kettle's Yard thing if she thought it was... and 'Och, of course, Jim is just so bent on it that I can't even put my knitting down anywhere' and so on. She felt this... the intensity of this could be a little bit much for her. She liked to prick it a bit, and yet in an extraordinary way, she also entered into it.
Helen standing up for herself
Mary Adams
Transcript
She dropped her knitting and he got up... the ball rolled across the room, he got up and in getting up, pulled something in his back or somewhere, you know, and staggered to the floor, fell over and bumped his knee and she said 'serves you right!', for no apparent reason, you know, she was quite able to stand up for herself. A lovely thing that I was reminded of the other day, when she was cooking and he was hovering around in the most irritating way over the gas cooker where she was and he said 'have you finished with this gas?' and she said 'No, I have not!' which was lovely so did know how to deal with him, you know, she kept him in his place.
Making artwork exploring Helen's role, part of residency in 1998
Anne Eggebert
Transcript
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.






