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
–
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.
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.
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
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
.
