Upside Down/Inside Out at Kettle's Yard

In the house, sixteen artists will take part in a retrospective of interventions from the last fourteen years. In the gallery, paintings and sculptures, normally seen in the house, will be redisplayed in different formations.

For many people the house at Kettle’s Yard is a place of stability which remains reassuringly the same each time they come. Meticulously arranged by its founder Jim Ede, with every painting and pebble in place, Kettle’s Yard is a haven of order and calm. But as Michael Harrison, Director of Kettle’s Yard, says: ‘We can get too used to seeing Kettle’s Yard as it is and stop looking. It’s extraordinary how you can see things afresh if you shuffle the pack and introduce new things.’

From time to time artists have been invited to respond to the house by introducing new work. From 18 July to 27 September visitors will find Kettle’s Yard not quite as they remember it. Michael Craig-Martin will be back, painting white walls pink, while Richard Wentworth covers the grand piano with broken and mended china. Judith Goddard invokes the presence and absence of Jim Ede’s wife Helen, and Ian Hamilton Finlay announces that ‘Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge, England is the Louvre of the pebble’. There will be a reprise of Douglas Allsop’s reflective video-tape screen, Edmund de Waal’s installations of porcelain pots, and Daniel Edwards’ cast concrete tablets. And a recall for photographers Graham Murrell and Kathryn Faulkner who photographed the light in the house over the passage of a year.

Also featured, for the first time, are works by three artists, each responding to Kettle’s Yard. Jayne Parker’s films, ‘Trilogy: Kettle’s Yard’, have cellist Anton Lukoszevieze, playing to images of Rodin’s Eve, Gabo, Brancusi and Lucie Rie. Mary Lemley catalogues the contents of her own home, item by item, and David Sheppard creates a new radio sound-work for visitors to play with. And, courtesy of Issam Kourbaj, visitors can pick up a camera obscura and look at it all upside down.

While the house is upside down, the collection turns inside out in the exhibition gallery. Paintings by Ben Nicholson, Christopher Wood, William Congdon and Alfred Wallis, drawings by Elisabeth Vellacott and Mario Sironi, sculptures by Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, and many more breathe new air and open up new conversations.

To coincide with the exhibition, Kettle’s Yard is publishing a new, expanded edition of ‘Kettle’s Yard and its Artists’ with writings by Jim Ede and the artists he collected, drawn form the archive.