In the front room of Jim and Helen Ede’s cottage sits a small oval stone by Ian Hamilton Finlay. It reads “KETTLE’S YARD, CAMBRIDGE, ENGLAND IS THE LOUVRE OF THE PEBBLE.”
Finlay’s words are a pithy summary of a space that exudes quiet elegance. Caught between a gallery, a home and an archive, Kettle’s Yard is the only place you can fall asleep on an armchair facing a Constantin Brâncuși sculpture and no one will wake you up. Despite holding one of the largest collections of 20th-century English paintings, there are no art-speak captions, few plinths, and hardly any artificial lights. The effect is a feeling of ease, helped no doubt by the lack of red tape.
Since moving to Cambridge, I’ve visited Kettle’s Yard as much as possible. Each time I go, I become more curious about the people who work there. They are hard to spot, sitting on chairs in ordinary clothes. I wanted to know how it felt to work in an art gallery that never moves around its collection or to care for someone’s old home after they’d gone. I also wanted to know which piece of work was their favourite and where they liked to sit.
Last week, I tracked down Samantha, Shirley-Anne, and Aaron on the long white sofa in the lower extension. Outside their roles as Visitor Assistants, they are an art history PhD student, a potter and an artist. For Shirley-Anne, working at Kettle’s Yard compliments her practice outside. “I subconsciously draw a lot of inspiration from the house’s potters. Their colour palettes, glazes, and particularly their shapes,” she explained.
When I provocatively asked whether working at Kettle’s Yard was ever boring, the answer was a resounding no. “Every time you walk into a space at Kettle’s Yard, you find something that you haven’t seen before, and that’s the great thing about it” Samantha replied.
“Every time you walk into a space at Kettle’s Yard, you find something that you haven’t seen before”
Having experienced the same phenomenon myself, I nodded. Yet, I was still curious to know how staff spent their time. Samantha, Shirley-Anne, and Aaron tended to gravitate to the same spaces in the house. Samantha liked sitting next to a Henri Gaudier-Brzeska’ sculpture in the upper extension and Shirley-Anne, on the bridge facing the plants. Aaron described his “safe space” as downstairs in the lower extension during the first thirty minutes of the day. “95 per cent of the time, I’m reading philosophy or art.” Aaron says. It helps “match the energy of the house.” Shirley-Anne spends her time sketching ideas out for future projects. Samantha reads up on the collection or art history in general. “It just gives you a greater understanding of these kinds of characters and personalities … that nexus of patronage.” she explains.
These so-called “characters and personalities” came up a lot in my conversations. Kettle’s Yard was as much a social space as it was a home. Jim called it a place that “comes alive when used.” This continues to be the case today, where the sharing of unexpected anecdotes is a two-way process between visitors and staff. Samantha tells how Jim’s granddaughter shared a memory of Gaudier-Brzeska’s Lady Macbeth’s hanging in the toilet as a reminder to wash your hands. Rumour has it that Jim bought Joan Miró’s ‘Tic Tic’ for the price of a cup of coffee. Anecdotes are passed on to the in-house archivist and made available on the oral history repository online.
Being nosy, I was curious to know how Samantha, Shirley-Anne, and Aaron perceived the visitors themselves. Shirley-Anne noted that whilst children were more likely to focus on “natural objects, weird and wonderful things … [like] the cat-fish skull,” older people might look at the willow-pattern pottery and remark, “my grandmother had one of those.” Samantha also noted how older audiences would often come with an eye on a particular artist, whilst younger visitors were increasingly coming in from a “photography point of view … thinking about composition, light.[and] space.” Broadly speaking, though, people choose to focus on whatever they want. You can view the house through the lens of furniture (there are over 100 chairs), materials, or space. The joy of working as a Visitor Assistant, Shirley-Anne explains, is seeing “the space through other people’s eyes.”
“Kettle’s Yard is where you can come to reset before going out to fight in the real world”
Whilst Aaron described other galleries as like “newspapers,” reflecting current affairs and striving for the zeitgeist, Kettle’s Yard was the embodiment of a kind of “art for art’s sake”. This, as Samantha put it, was what made the gallery “fundamentally different.” Although the library upstairs offers the opportunity to contextualise the pieces and Visitor Assistants are there to impart information “beyond guidebooks,” as Shirley-Anne adds, the guiding principle is that you encounter the artwork before you ascribe meaning to it. Samantha summarised this as the space’s “driving force”.
For Aaron, the overwhelming feeling of Kettle’s Yard was one of “anchoring,” “safety,” and nostalgia. During our conversation, Aaron realised that the house’s architecture and sloping light “took him back” to a gallery he would visit with his mother when he was a child. His mother also used to lean pictures against the wall on the floor of his home, another trademark feature of Kettle’s Yard. Aaron thus experiences the house as “charmingly familiar.” His comments echoed Shirley-Anne’s, who said that she chose to sit on the bridge most days because she “grew up in a house with plants.”
Towards the end of my conversation, Aaron remarked that Kettle’s Yard was “where you can come to reset before going out to fight in the real world”. His words reminded me of a quote I’d read by Jim in his 1984 book A Way of Life. “In a world rocked by greed, misunderstanding and fear … it is still possible and justifiable to find important the exact placement of two pebbles.” Then and now, Kettle’s Yard gives visitors and assistants alike the rare possibility of being able to switch off and step back into a simpler world of light, space, and stone.
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