gallery
Jim's vision for the future of Kettle's Yard
Denis Murphy
Transcript
I used to be the go-between between him and the University and I remember talking to him about, when the extension had been built, I remember talking to him about how he saw the thing in 50 years time, I was deliberately provoking him. I'd just been to Paris and I'd been to the Couloncourt Museum. I said, you know, 'do you imagine in 50 years time that it's all going to be like this? You know, how do you see it? Is it going to develop? Is it going to take in new objects?' He was struck, as if to say, 'well of course its going to be like this in 50 years time'. I said, 'well, it can't be the case. You're not going to be here in 50 years time, nor am I, who is going to look after it? What's it's function going to be? Is it going to be dead?' Like the Musee Couloncourt, sorry, it's the Musee Carnavalet in Paris, it's that museum of the city of Paris. I said 'I've just been there and I've seen, you know, bits of Napoleon's memorabilia and dusty objects and the whole thing looks extremely sort of grimy. He took this in and he came back and said, 'well, we have to have an exhibition gallery, something that's moving all the time as well as something that's static. So the house was eventually the static area and he gave the new young curators quite a hard time over it. You weren't allowed to move things. Things had to stay the way they are.
Role of the curator, 1977-1983
Jeremy Lewison
Transcript
As Paul [Clough] will have told you, on Thursday mornings we went down before 9 o'clock to the WI stall to buy flowers and we'd do all the flower arrangements and it had to be those, kind of, cottage flowers, it wasn't formal, it was cottage flowers which went with the cottage garden, if you like. So, obviously a lot of my time was spent organising exhibitions. I would organise the show, I would drive the van to collect the works of art, I would organise the insurance, I would paint the walls of the gallery, I would sweep the floors, hang every work of art, with my assistants obviously. I drove as far afield as St Just in Cornwall to collect works for an exhibition and back again. It was exhausting actually. I can remember taking works by Eric Gill back after an Eric Gill exhibition that we had. I dropped off some works at the Tate Gallery, then I drove onto Weymouth, where I dropped off something else, then I went on to Totnes in Devon - the exhibition had been organised by the Dartington - dropped off some things there, I was with Mike Tooby at the time, then we went on to St Just to collect works by Karl Veschke for the next exhibition and we were back within two days. Painted the gallery, hung the show and it opened by... so the whole thing took place over seven days. We'd shut an exhibition on a Sunday, we'd strike it on a Monday, we'd deliver it all back on the Tuesday, collect the next stuff Tuesday or Wednesday, we'd be back in the gallery Thursday, hang it, off we went, and we did everything.
Developing an exhibition across the house and the gallery in 2007
Edmund de Waal
Transcript
There is always the difficulty, what can you possibly bring into Kettle's Yard? How can you possibly dare to move something around in Kettle's Yard? So that would have been a kind of project which would have been very difficult, would have framed me entirely within Jim's aesthetic, but to get the chance to do something in the gallery as well, meant that I could show where I got to with my thinking and also have a conversation with Kettle's Yard and that was wonderful, absolutely wonderful and it's been by far the most complicated and stimulating exhibition I've ever had to do and it's moved me on in lots and lots of ways. What I wanted to do was to reflect my own experience of the house so there were three or four different experiences I wanted to bring out, my own conversation with the house. So, for instance, one of my great conversations with Kettle's Yard is about reading, reading and pots, so that the piece in the library was very much about... instead of sitting down and reading a book, you sat down and had a pot there instead of a book.
