reading
Visiting with only one staff member and invigilating in the mid 1970s
Mike Tooby
Transcript
You went past the person on the door and then you were on your own. Now, I do realise that... I mean, in retrospect, I gradually discovered that that was particular to that moment but, at the time, that was one of the great joys of it. The job of the person down at the door, I later discovered, was to establish that the person was welcome, sign the book, any routine things like, 'Would you like to leave a bag and a coat?' Later on we introduced a photo permit. The overwhelming impression was of it being quiet and free of people. You might meet one or two other people there. Quite often the people that one met would be people who, like me, would just find somewhere to sit and sit there, maybe read a book, maybe bring a book with them to sit and read. The invigilator down at the door might occasionally, if they felt confident, go up and have a walk around and see where whoever was in the house had got to, but of course if you did that you got too far away and you couldn't hear the bell. What worried one was that someone would turn away if the door wasn't opened straight away so you tended to stay by the door.
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.






