Sculpture as witness at Jesus College / The Director's Blog / Thursday 11th July

I was recently asked to open ‘Sculpture in the Close, 2013′ , a superb display of recent work by five international artists in the grounds and buildings of Jesus College . All the works have political or social reverberations that demand our active attention. It was great to be asked to speak, as I have known one of the artists for twenty-five years – Miroslaw Balka .

I first met him in the winter of 1988 at his parent’s house at Otwock; about 30 minutes drive from Warsaw. Miroslaw took Maria Morzuch (my collaborator from the Museum Sztuki in Lodz) and I out of the kitchen door of a modest terraced house, down the small garden path, to a large shed. Inside, in the half-light, we could see a number of rough plaster sculptures of the human body – one appeared to be swimming, another was suspended on the wall, but was missing its head. Later Maria told me that Otwock was the site of Nazi crimes against the Jewish population in the War. It was clear to me that this tall, rather serious young artist was searching how to say something important through sculpture. His work seeks to acknowledge the traumatic history of 20th century Poland; what this history might mean in the present.

His subsequent work, exhibited around the globe to considerable acclaim, has continued to challenge us about the meaning that materials and images can evoke. At Jesus College he has three works – all remarkable. Two are videos but he rightly considers them sculptures. They are physical in their presence.

Miroslaw Balka, Primitive (2008)

Miroslaw Balka, 170 x 126 x 10 / T. Turn (2004)

Also at Jesus College don’t miss the American artist Theater Gates’ ‘My Labour is my Protest’. As you walk from the College entrance round to a second court, there on the immaculate lawn is a 1960′s US fire truck. The real thing. Incongruous doesn’t quite describe it!

Theaster Gates, My Labour is My Protest (2012)

Though it strikes me that behind the peaceful walls of College courts in Cambridge are researchers addressing many of the most urgent social, human and political issues of our time. As in Balka’s work there is a lot of history here. This is one of the fire trucks used as a weapon – with its high pressure hose – against civil rights protestors in Birmingham, Alabama in 1963. Gates recalls this moment but also reclaims it: the truck is daubed with black tar. Nearby a related, and moving, film is showing. As Rod Mengham, the curator of this special exhibition notes in the catalogue, Life Magazine published images of the peaceful protestors taking the full force of a fire hose cannonade under the famous caption: ‘They fight a fire that won’t go out’. Jesus College has been organising Sculpture in the Close every two years since 1988. This edition is unmissable if you want to experience the ambition and depth of sculpture now.

- Andrew Nairne

This year the exhibition features the work of Miroslaw Balka, Theaster Gates, Harland Miller, Damian Ortega and Doris Salcedo.

The exhibition is free to visit and open daily from 24 June until 22 September (11am – 8pm) at Jesus College, entrance off Jesus Lane. Programmes are available from the Porters’ Lodge.

Paul Coldwell / Re-Imagining Scott, Objects & Journeys / Friday 14th June

British artist Paul Coldwell staged the intervention, I called while you were out, in the Kettle’s Yard house in 2008-2009. Through June and July this year he is exhibiting work at  The Polar Museum , a fellow University of Cambridge Museum . Using printmaking and sculpture, Coldwell re-imagines aspects of Captain Robert Falcon Scott’s final expedition to construct images and objects that explore the sense of loss felt around the world at the news of Scott’s death. Here Paul tells us about his work in these two projects. 

In 2008, I was delighted to be invited by the late Michael Harrison to make some work to be placed into the house at Kettle’s Yard. Over a period of a year I visited Cambridge on a regular basis and began absorbing myself in the house, the collection and getting to know the people that worked there. I like to slowly infiltrate and Michael was generous in giving me time and space within which my ideas could gradually evolve. It is a privilege to get to know a new place and I found it stirred thoughts that had been just under the surface, waiting for an opportunity to be explored.

On my walks from the station to Kettle’s Yard I would pass Scott Polar Research Institute (SPRI) and out of curiosity I began to visit the museum. In 2012, I approached Heather Lane, Librarian and Keeper with a proposal to research their archive on Captain Robert Falcon Scott’s final expedition and present the results in an exhibition. SPRI Archives contain a great wealth of material on the Heroic Era of Antarctic exploration, from personal journals and sledging notebooks to meteorological logs and watercolours. In particular, the physical objects in the archive enabled me to sense the physical nature of the enterprise, while albums of press cuttings, kept by Kathleen Scott and then given to her son Peter, provided me with an insight into the manner in which the journey to the pole captured popular imagination.

Implements for a journey Toothbrush - Razor - Toothpaste - Comb - Soap Glass, resin and cotton, 2013 approx. 26cm x 70cm

Both these projects have proved to be very productive encounters for me, but have also presented very different problems and challenges. Kettle’s Yard is the visual masterwork of Jim Ede and I felt a degree of trepidation in disturbing what is otherwise a sealed fixed environment. The contents of the house are predominantly artworks so, as another artist, one has to be sensitive in finding spaces to occupy. SPRI on the other hand is a working scientific institution and one needs to have confidence to feel that an artistic interpretation of the archive material and the inherent stories can make a contribution to knowledge and understanding.

Working from collections and archives means that I can look outside of myself and immerse myself in other stories, events and characters. Paradoxically, it is through this that I believe I am able to make work, which confronts my own fears and anxieties, and through that, share these experience with others.

 ~ Paul Coldwell

Paul Coldwell
Re-Imagining Scott: Objects & Journeys
31 May – 20 July 2013
The Polar Museum, Scott Polar Research Institute

Sound art served in a sour dough bun / The Frontroom / Thursday 18th April

To launch their 2013 programme the good people at The Frontroom have invited Kleeep-a-Kleeep, Bad Timing and the infamous Steak and Honour for an evening of experimental sound, great dialogue and classic American burgers. You’d all be very welcome too. Friday 19th April 7-9pm

(Slightly) more info at www.frontroomcambridge.com

Excavating the present / Issam Kourbaj / Tuesday 26th March

Issam Kourbaj ‘s exhibition ‘ Excavating the Present’ is on at the SIXONESIX Gallery, part of Changing Spaces, until Sunday 7 April. It is an exhibition in collaboration with the Oxfam Syria Crisis Appeal. Here he tells us more about his series of work in the exhibition. 

We are a landscape of all we have seen.

—Isamu Noguchi

We had only one book in our house, and it was kept in the attic. It was called The Science of Anatomy and Physiology of the Human Body . It belonged to my sister, then a qualified nurse. As a schoolboy, I remember climbing up to the dark attic and losing – or rather finding – myself in the drawings, in the hidden and intricate wonders of the human viscera.

My mother was very generous. Though she had hardly had any form of schooling, she taught me by holding my hand in her hand; together, we “drew” the twenty-eight letters of the alphabet. She made me understand that letters are not just parts of a word or fragments of language, but a drawing too.

My mother had learnt the art of survival from her mother. My Lebanese grandmother had had her form of surviving the mountains’ cold nights by stitching a thick quilt out of the family’s worn-out clothes. Though I barely knew her (she died before I was able to hold a pencil), her legacy the ‘quilt’, formed my early nightscape. It was my first encounter with abstract form.

My uncle Suleiman, my mother’s brother, who I had never met, formed with his resourcefulness my early vision. He had discovered, in a time of hardship, an unusual source of income. During the French mandate in Syria, many bombs were left unexploded. My uncle found a way to make spoons and coffee pots out of them. Until one day he met his last breath, and found a bomb that did explode.

My city, was named Swaida (Little black town) because it was built from black volcanic stone. Located in the mountains south of Damascus, known for its wealth of vineyards since Roman times, It is home to the ruins of many ancient civilizations. My little black town was a hotbed of Syria’s revolt against the French in the summer of 1925.

The smell of the orange skin burning on the top of the stove marked the transition from one year to another: this was our New Year’s Eve ritual. We all sat round the stove, the kerosene lamp burned and story-telling began. My father had many stories to tell, for he had spent most of his life away, fighting against the French.

In Cambridge, I was privileged to have my first studio behind the Round Church and ADC theatre. My studio was an old snooker room, with no heating. At that time, I was studying theatre design in London, and I created a set for the Olivier Theatre based on the Epic of Gilgamesh – Gilga the hero, he who saw everything. While Gilgamesh looked for immortality, I was busy excavating in the ADC theatre skip. There I found many discarded theatre sets and props, which, I am sure, my Uncle Suleiman would have regarded as unexploded bombs.

I went to Mexico to learn about colour from the Mayans, and then on to Cuba. I started making sculptures out of old chairs. I had been told stories about Cubans who made boats out of their furniture so as to sail to Miami. Unfortunately, many did not survive the waves.

My preoccupation with light began by accident, and in a small way. In 2003, at the time of the Iraq war, I worked on a project called Palimpsest, etching on hospital and veterinary X-ray plates. This project led me to search for further possibilities that light could offer. In the dark attic of my studio at Christ’s College, a knot-hole in the boarded-up window projected a live image of the street and its people and vehicles onto the ceiling. Its discovery made me begin research on a device at that time entirely unknown to me, the pinhole camera, and its natural extension, the Camera Obscura. I conceived a project called Last Light/First Light , relying solely on light-sources, lenses and mirrors.

Since then, I started my experiments with camera-less photography, using light, chemicals and two or three dimensional surfaces; photography at its rudiments. The series, Excavating the Present , is a palimpsest of two different kinds of camera-less photograms. One is X-ray assemblages; though manipulated, they are essentially a photogram, produced by invisible, highly-penetrating electromagnetic radiation, on Mylar plastic coated with light sensitive emulsion. In turn, the X-ray films became “found negatives” and are used to generate the second kind of photogram – produced by visible light on light sensitive black-and-white paper in a darkroom.

The ritual in which archaeologists bring human traces to life is in many ways a reenactment of the burial process, but in reverse. What is unearthed acts as evidence of what shaped the past. Syrians are involuntary archaeologists now, trying to find bits of their martyrs to bury them. We are voluntarily and with courage, excavating our present, searching for light not stained by fear and blood.

In making this series as a tribute to Syrian mothers, I thought of my sister’s book in the attic; my mother’s hand holding mine; my grandmother’s stitching. When the 24 photograms – one for each month of my people’s collective suffering – were ready, I saw the inhuman condition that the courageous women, children and men are going through in my country. I fear for the future of their past and of their present; of the things they daily see; and the landscapes they might become.

~ Issam Kourbaj

Alfred Wallis Tour / Time and Tide, Great Yarmouth / Tuesday 19th March

Today saw a selection of our Alfred Wallis paintings leaving for further afield – to the Time and Tide Museum , Great Yarmouth. Jim Ede’s wonderful collection of Alfred Wallis works are on tour having previously been exhibited at the Art Exchange , University of Essex in January and February 2013 and in a Kettle’s Yard exhibition in 2012. We are so pleased to be able to share these fantastic paintings with other museums around the region and hope you enjoy visiting their exhibition of Jim’s collection.

The exhibition at Time and Tide opens on 30 March – 8 September 2013.

After that we will see Alfred Wallis’ work visit The City Gallery , Vivacity Arts in Peterborough from 20 September to 17 November 2013.

If you love Alfred Wallis you can buy the Kettle’s Yard Alfred Wallis catalogue in the shop and online here: http://www.kettlesyard.co.uk/shop/catalogues/

Let us know in the comments below what your favourite Alfred Wallis painting from the Kettle’s Yard collection is. We will choose a someone’s suggestion to feature as a favourite Wallis on our page.

Cambridge Junction / Cambridge Culture / Thursday 14th March

We love to find out and share what events, shows and exhibitions are  happening in Cambridge. Daniel Pitt, Producer: Arts at Cambridge Junction, tells us the exciting ideas and events happening in their corner of the city. 

At Cambridge Junction , we’re interested in new ideas and I consider my role as Producer: Arts to be about facilitating and supporting the development of these ideas, sometimes risky ideas, into reality.

Cambridge Junction is a centre for both the presentation and development of innovative contemporary performance. We’re generally interested in ideas with a performance bent to them, but the definitions of all art forms are becoming so blurred these days that we’re open to all kinds of things.
We’re part of the newly formed Visual Arts Cambridge  consortium. This includes Kettle’s Yard and Aid & Abet , who I feel share an attitude of openness towards what contemporary arts are becoming. Cambridge Junction’s aim is to explore the intersections where the boundaries are not so clear. The points where art, popular culture and learning all collide is something that people are still working out. As Daniel Brine, Artistic Director, described it at our Season Launch Night at the beginning of February, ‘we want to be a hub for… stuff’.

This season, as we re-launched, we introduced two new strands to the programme, SAMPLE and Junction University .

SAMPLE is Cambridge Junction opening our programme of artist development to the public. This see’s the ideas exposed while they’re still being realised. Originating from the established SAMPLED Festival , it is now a year-round programme of work in development. I fill our studio week in week out with local, regional, national and international performance groups that we’re interested in, providing our space as an investment in their idea.

Junction University  is about what artists can teach the public; opportunities for new, unusual artistic experiences for free. We like to say it is Cambridge’s third university – it’s definitely the cheapest. These are workshops for anybody, they involve artistic responses to daily life and how art of all kinds (conceptual, written, graphic, sound, dance, etc) can respond to, or enhance our life. We opened the season by creating an invisible museum at The Fitzwilliam Museum and have lots of exciting events planned from a virtual tattoo parlour  (above photo) to making Manga themed Bento lunch boxes .

Have a look at the full selection here and I’m always happy to from local artists with ideas that might suit us!

~ Daniel Pitt, Producer: Arts, Cambridge Junction

Folk Museum gets a new Director / Dr Catherine Morris / Wednesday 6th March

The Cambridge Folk Museum , our next door neighbours, have appointed Dr Catherine Morris as their new Director. Here at Kettle’s Yard we want to welcome Catherine and are really look forward to working with her.

Catherine comes to Cambridge from Ireland where she was Cultural Coordinator, working to generate partnership opportunities between the National Library of Ireland and Trinity College Dublin . She has had a best selling 2012 book and National Library exhibition, Alice Milligan and the Irish Cultural Revival  which was described by Declan Kiberd as “A profound and moving analysis of one of the greatest inventors of modern Ireland”.

Her main aims as Director are to strengthen local and international partnerships, to interpret the history of Cambridge and to work more closely with the University’s museums . It is a great to see her vision for the Cambridge Folk Museum and more widely for cultural life in Cambridge.

It is an exciting time for the Cambridge Folk Museum with a renaming as ‘The Museum of Cambridge’ coming up this year. We look forward to working with them under this new banner in the future.

You can visit their website to find out more information  here.

You can also connect with the Cambridge Folk Museum on and .

Alfred Wallis: Ships and Boats / New catalogue and touring exhibition / Thursday 10th January

We were very excited this week to get our hands on our new Alfred Wallis catalogue.

With Alfred Wallis being a key figure in Jim Ede’s collection at Kettle’s Yard, the catalogue follows on from our successful exhibition Alfred Wallis: Ships and Boats here last year. The book highlights the best works in the collection, including many that are not normally on display, taking a fresh look at Wallis and his relationship to Kettle’s Yard.  It reflects the range of Wallis’ subjects as well as the extraordinary diversity of compositional and painterly effects that he created from his basic palette and materials. The book shares with us new and archival material with over 70 illustrations, excerpts from letters and texts by Michael Bird, Ben Nicholson and Jim Ede. You can buy the catalogue in our gallery shop and it will be available online soon.

Also this week Guy Haywood, our Exhibitions Assistant, has been at Art Exchange , University of Essex, to install Alfred Wallis work from our collection. In 1964 Jim Ede donated a number of works, including five paintings by Alfred Wallis, to the newly established University of Essex in affirmation that there “should be a Kettle’s Yard in every University”. This exhibition brings together the Alfred Wallis paintings from our own collection with those from the University of Essex’s Jim Ede Collection. We are really looking forward to seeing the work from our collection alongside these others at the Art Exchange – the exhibition runs from Monday 14 January until Sunday 17 February 2013.

Read here a past blog post looking back on the Alfred Wallis exhibition to refresh your memory!

Christmas Tree Festival / St Giles' Church / Tuesday 4th December

Kettle’s Yard was kindly invited, along with twenty-three other local groups, businesses and schools, to each decorate a real Christmas tree to go on display as part of St Giles’ Church Christmas tree festival. With the theme of our tree being Reflections on Nature we set to work hand making our decorations using natural materials such as pine cones, shells and pebbles.

You can see our decorated tree on display in St Peter’s Church next door to Kettle’s Yard, with the other Christmas tree’s on show across the street at St Giles’ Church. The festival runs until 9 December 2012, with events and activities happening throughout the week.

Lunchtime Concerts / St Giles' Church/ Michaelmas / Tuesday 16th October

The lunchtime recitals for this Michaelmas term havebeen released!The series begins at St Giles' Church on 19 October,with a trombone recital by Newbury Young Musicianof the Year, Mike Buchanan. The following week,flautist Rosie Bowker will perform a recital includingVarèse, Debussy and Schubert. Audiences are in for a treat on 2 November: TheFourier Quartet perform Schubert's epic 'Death and theMaiden'String Quartet in D minor. The next two weeksat St Giles' are reserved for more intimate recitals.Anne Denholm, BBC Young Musician of the Year StringFinalist, presents a harp recital featuring worksby Hindemith and Spohr on the 9 November. Closingthe series on the 16 November, Mark Seow plays aHandel violin sonata on historical instrumentation.

Andy Holden / Latitude Festival 2012 / Friday 3rd August

Andy Holden ‘s monumental sculpture, Unquiet Grave, appeared in the woods at this year’s Latitude music festival in Suffolk as part of Latitude Contemporary Art .

Looming five metres from the ground this huge wooden structure forced the gaze of festival goers upward and into the depth of its cavernous mouth. Painted boards wrapped haphazardly around both the outside and the inside, pinned in a static whirlwind as if trying to summon the energy to cough out one final, resounding word. It was, of course, mute. Touching on ideas surrounding scale, amplification and the obsolete, Holden’s sculpture is a monument to a dying object, the megaphone. At one point a critical tool in the distribution of information and for amplifying the power of the voice, it has been condemned in the age of digitalisation and social networking to become a defunct, soundless form.

Andy Holden’s band The Grubby Mitts also performed twice on the In The Woods stage during the festival. Watch a video of them performing their new single Standard live at Latitude below. The single is available on the Lost Toys Records website.

GH

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Andy Holden and David Raymond Conroy’s stage adaptation of David Foster Wallace’s Brief Interviews with Hideous Men will be at the ICA from 30-31st August 2012. Find out more and book tickets on the ICA website.

The Grubby Mitts will be performing at Wysing Arts Centre ‘s Space Time music festival on 1st September 2012.

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Image: Courtesy the artist

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The Grubby Mitts will be performing at Wysing Arts Centre’s Space Time music festival on 1st September 2012.
Andy Holden’s exhibition Chewy Cosmos Thingly Time was at Kettle’s Yard in 2011.

Offsite events / Wysing’s festival of art and music / Tuesday 31st July

Don’t miss Space-Time: And If It Was It Can’t Be Is, Wysing’s festival of art and music on Saturday 1st September.   Titled by artist Mark Titchner, who will play a live set by musician Alexander Tucker, it includes three stages of live music, spoken word performances, film screenings, artists’ stalls and activities for families at Wysing’s beautiful rural site near Bourn.

The line-up includes pioneers from past, present and future including Bruce Lacey (currently exhibiting at Camden Arts Centre), Boyle Family, the influential family collective of artists who also made light projections for Pink Floyd and Soft Machine, and Damo Suzuki, who was part of one of the most influential krautrock bands of the 1970s, Can, and will extend his Damo Suzuki Network to Wysing to play with Andy Holden’s band Grubby Mitts.

Other performers include artists Sue Tompkins, Jamie Shovlin’s band Lustfaust and Anthea Hamilton, plus experimental art and music bands such as Ice Sea Dead People, Maria and The Mirrors, Peepholes, Yola Fatoush and Emptyset.

Date: Saturday, 1 September, 2012
Tickets: from £15

Camping and coaches from St Pancras and Cambridge are available. Find out more here .

New Music / Lunchtime Concerts / Thursday 28th June

As the end of term approaches, I look back at what has been an extremely successful series of lunchtime concerts. During this exam-term, I rarely left the hermetically-sealed grounds of Girton College, oscillating between the library and my room. However, revision was articulated by my weekly cycle to St Giles’ Church for the Friday lunchtime concert. And each week, I was delighted by the beautiful music performed by students of the University.

A recital by Fra Rustumji (violin) to a packed-out St Giles’ was particularly exciting. The concert showcased two contemporary works by young composers Laurence Osborn and Kate Whitley, with Kate accompanying on the piano. The works gave a glimpse into New Music today, creating experimental textures and timbres from the age-old couple: the violin and piano. The program was well-structured; by bookmarking the recital with ‘sonatas’, Fra gave us a “backwards” journey from modernity into tradition.

I look forward to this Friday’s concert, which will the last recital of the series. See the Kettle’s Yard website for more details.

Mark Seow

Mark Seow / Lunchtime concerts / Friday 25th May

During the build at Kettle’s Yard, the lunchtime concerts have been taking place across the road at St Giles’ Church. And despite the rain, audiences have flocked to hear performances of Mozart, Beethoven and Schumann. The relocation has allowed even larger audiences, in a celebration of what perhaps has been one of the most successful seasons of lunchtime concerts.

Photograph by Amy Jeffs

Particular highlights have included a horn extravaganza by Misha Mullov-Abbado (pictured) and Stephen Craigen. The pair provided a varied program on both modern and natural horn, showcasing the instrument’s range of timbres and techniques. Nick Mogg provided a beautifully balanced program, in which he interweaved a Mahler song cycle with lieder by Schubert. The acoustic of the church was particularly suited to his warm baritone range.

The relocation of the lunchtime series has reaffirmed the importance of setting in concerts, and the deliciously close relationship between music and the visual arts. When the concerts took place at Kettle’s Yard, sounds were delineated and crystallised against the white walls, and sometimes even seemed to be in dialogue with the sculptures and paintings. At St Giles’, the music takes on a very different meaning. For example, in Stephen Craigen’s performance of Kirchner’s Tre Poemi which makes use of the synthetic echoes of the piano strings, it became impossible to detangle what was sound, echo or reverberation. The music spoke not only of the horn and the piano, but of the Church’s lofty nave, chancel and stained glass.
Concerts take place on Fridays 1.10-1.50pm, free, donations welcome. See www.kettlesyard.co.uk/music/lunchtime for details.

Mark Seow, Cambridge University student programmer of the Friday lunchtime concert series, photos by Amy Jeffs

St Giles / Lunchtime concerts / Monday 14th May

While the building work is underway we are unable to host our regular free Friday lunchtime concerts. We are delighted that St Giles church, over the road on the corner of Castle Street and Chesterton Street, is hosting these concerts for us. And, the good news is that they can fit more people in there.

The lunchtime concerts are usually performed by musicians from the University of Cambridge and are programmed by a student programmer. They offer a great opportunity to hear some of the musical talent in Cambridge and may of the performers go on to have professional careers in the future.

Concerts are every Friday in Cambridge University term time at 1.10pm, the full programme can be seen on our main website .

To hear one of the past performers, pianist Tom Poster, talking about his thoughts about Kettle’s Yard see our oral history archive .