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pebbles

The aesthetic of Kettle's Yard leaves a lasting impression


Paul Clough

Transcript
Kettle's Yard gets under your skin. Kettle's Yard, especially if you experience it the kind of way I did, alters the way you look at things and my guess is that in the rooms of most of the people that you've interviewed, if you've interviewed them in their own settings, you will have been able to see bits of the Kettle's Yard aesthetic and it's more than just pebbles, it is a distinct aesthetic. That actually is one of the extraordinary things about Jim's achievement and one of the things that Kettle's Yard gives and offers - it produces or promotes an aesthetic which was not fashionable at the time he created it, it has becomes fashionable and I think he is not the only exponent of it, but there is something very influential about the conversion of those four little cottages. So, you're likely to see echoes of it if you're a visually aware person all over the place, all over the world, and that's something that Kettle's Yard has given me that I don't have any regrets about. Jim was human and the mistake about Jim Ede is to put him into a position of suggesting that he isn't human, or wasn't human. He had his flaws, I was unlucky enough to be exposed to them big time but that didn't take away from the fact that he had very great gifts.

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.

Enjoying reading in the house, surrounded by artworks, early 1980s


Edmund de Waal

Transcript
The thing about being able to sit and read in Kettle's Yard, to look and read simultaneously, seemed to me completely correct actually, that actually it was not the sanctified space of art where one valorised object sits beautifully lit and that you pay homage to it and that everything else is aligned as if there's nothing there but you and the art object. But it seemed to me utterly so wonderful to be able to sit in an armchair with a David Jones book of poetry and have a Gaudier-Brzeska sculpture in front of you or the pebbles or whatever. It seemed to me that's actually how life is. What made sense was both the domesticity of it, you know, the house-ness of it. The fact that it had all the different kinds of spaces in which you could be and you could move between them and have different moods, to sit or be in different kinds of spaces and still look at things, but then it was also the encounter between the objects and the house so that again those hierarchies seem to be broached.

Invigilating c.1980, responding to the whole visual environment


Eleanor Engle

Transcript
You know, at the age 19, 20, it was really, I think it was probably very influential on me. The fact that, it wasn't just that it was pictures all over the wall, but it was that everything was, sort of, mixed in together. Lots of people said, 'Oh, it's so nice because it has such a peaceful atmosphere there', but I think for me, really, it was just that it was a... the whole thing was a whole visual environment. Visual language is not the thing in Cambridge and that's what I was pining for, that's what I wanted. Being in that environment, you know, having the excuse to be there for two hours on a Saturday to let people in, but really it was so that I could just soak in that whole... and look at, really just, not just soak in but actually look at all that whole visual environment - it's pebbles next to wild flowers next to Gaudier-Brzeska, a bit of thing, a bit of sculpture... I suppose because I sat on that table letting people in, that really sunk into me somewhere.