little altars everywhere

finding peace in Cambridge with Monet and Jim Ede

Photography by Paul Allitt. Kettle’s Yard, University of Cambridge (via AnOther magazine)

In an unsuspecting house in Cambridge there is an art gallery called Kettle’s Yard. It was once the home of Tate curator Jim Ede and his wife Helen, who decided to knock through the four small cottage to create an unusually conceived space. The plan was that it would house the couple but it would also be a home for their collection of art. Sculptures by Barbara Hepworth and Henry Moore were placed alongside other everyday objects scavenged by Jim and Helen on walks to the coast. The pair would open up their house to students, with Jim giving tours in the afternoon.

In my second year at Cambridge I came to seek out spaces like Kettle’s Yard. My accommodation was no longer a picturesque attic room with balcony views of Kings College chapel. No - it was customary for second years to go to Wychfield, where the brutalist architecture of the Boho accommodation block felt like a sharp comedown from the hallowed walls we enjoyed in first year. I was struggling around that time, pushing up hard against the reality that I was not keeping up with my courses, something my weekly supervisions only confirmed.

In the spring a wave of depression arrived. ‘Is it a herbal tea depression or an I need drugs kind of depression?’ asked my Director of Studies. I explained it was probably the latter and he suggested I get support from the university’s counselling service, which was free.

The counselling rooms were on Trumpington Street opposite the Fitzwilliam Museum, the university’s larger art gallery. After my sessions finished I would cross the road and enter the Fitzwilliam, where I would then sit for twenty or thirty minutes at a time, sometimes just looking at one or two pictures. I was always surprised by how relatively quiet the gallery was, despite boasting one of the best art collections in the country. In the first chamber you enter, on the right hand wing of the gallery, are some of my favourite paintings, including Rocks at Port Coton, the Lion Rock, by Monet. It is an oil painting which depicts the coastline of Brittany in France, where he once spent ten weeks painting variations of this image over and over again. The choppy waters around the cliffs are captured in a way that the writer Émile Zola would describe as ‘alive, deep and above all real’. I would stand close to the painting, trying to imagine myself getting tossed around in its blue waves.

Rocks at Port Coton, the Lion Rock by Claude Monet (1840–1926), 1886, from The Fitzwilliam Museum.

But it was Kettle’s Yard that I returned to most frequently. It is situated at the bottom of a hill which you must walk or cycle up if you live on the Wychfield Site. I walked up it most days, bike in hand.

The first thing that strikes anybody visiting the gallery today is the expanse of whitewashed walls which act as a canvas to the Ede’s collection. This minimalist aesthetic is now commonplace, but it would have been striking to any student visiting their house in the 1960s, when the couple first gave the house and its collection to the University.

The Ede’s living space was home to me, at a time when I felt deeply that I didn’t really belong anywhere. I was comprehensively educated in ex-coal mining town in the midlands, and never really found my place at school. Now I was learning alongside people educated in the best public schools in the country, I didn’t belong here, either.

Walking around Kettle’s Yard felt like home; not in the sense that it felt like ‘my’ home, a cavernous Methodist manse two hundred miles away, but a home for my soul. The way the light entered each room, and the careful placement of art in unexpected places - beneath windowsills and alongside reading nooks, was everything I wanted in a space. The emptiness and intentionality of the cottage left you with yourself - with your own thoughts and company. It didn’t impose itself, or try to intimidate you, which I think is the real genius of Jim Ede’s legacy. He wanted art to become a natural, accessible part of our lives, not reserved for those in the know, but available to everyone, at no cost.

There is a bridge which connects the four cottages together, where Jim Ede constructed a makeshift glasshouse, erecting shelves against a large window on the first floor landing. In front of the plants hangs a large glass disc, which appears to float in mid air but which is actually suspended by an almost invisible thread of nylon. It refracts the light around it and magnifies the plants it spins in front of. It is called ‘Disc’ and was made by the Italian artist Gregoria Vardanega in 1960. Describing the moment he acquired the artwork, Jim Ede wrote ‘I was delighted to find in Paris, soon after it was made (1960), Vardanega’s large disc. Even the short length of fishing gut which holds it allowed it to rotate on it’s own for quite a while.’

This is my favourite space in the whole gallery. The first time I visited with my boyfriend, one November, I took photos of the plants arranged carefully in their terracotta pots, and set it as my Facebook cover photo. Behind the disc, the great-grandchildren of Ede’s original plants are visible, a living-incarnation of their owner’s vision.

Of his home, Jim wrote that:

‘This is an interior which looks into the outer world and has for me a transparent stillness through which to find and hold a sense of peace amidst ‘the manifold changes of this world’; peace which will, I hope, create a touchstone for life itself.’

Hello - thank you for reading,

Somehow it’s my daughter’s second birthday today, so we’ve already been up for several hours. She’s currently baking a cake downstairs with her dad as I sit in bed surrounded by birthday detritus.

Recommendation Corner: Heaven Sent

1. I’ve been listening to Dolly Parton’s America, a podcast which takes an anthropological look at America using its most successful country singer as its North Star. It’s brilliant, and I was often surprised by what Dolly had to say on politics and religion.

2. I’ve been reading Pew by

   Catherine Lacey
   about a nameless person who suddenly appears in a small, highly religious town, and Enlightenment by Sarah Perry which also explores faith, religion and science. I’ll probably post reviews of both for paid subscribers on Golden Hour next week. So do subscribe to that if you are in need of some books to add to your TBR (hahaha).

3. Speaking of Émile Zola,

   Brandon
   Taylor has dedicated a good chunk of time to reading Les Rougon-Macquart, Zola’s cycle of twenty(!) novels, for an LRB piece. Check it out here.

Thank you for reading,

Grace

Golden Hour #038: nothing is sacred

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