Kettle's Yard comes to Tate
Something Understood, Edmund de Waal, porcelain, 2008, sister piece to the Kettle’s Yard installation. Photocredit: New Art Centre, Roche Court
Cambridge comes to Milbank this month, when an exhibition of highlights from the Kettle’s Yard collection go on display at Tate Britain (9 May – 14 June)
The Kettle’s Yard collection was started by Jim Ede, a former curator at the Tate, who gave both his house and collection to Cambridge University in 1966. Although the body of the collection is made up of fine art from the first half of the 20th century – highlights include work by Ben Nicholson, Brancusi and Joan Miró among others – it also includes a good selection of historic and 20th-century applied arts with furniture, glass and ceramics well represented. The collection is growing all the time and, in a bid to give it a more contemporary flavour, the curators have recently commissioned two new works. The first is an installation by ceramist Edmund de Waal made up of an army of variously sized porcelain vessels lined up in a carefully arranged procession, and the second is a geometric ‘impingement’ by artist Gary Woodley. Both these pieces have been specially commissioned for the Tate exhibition and will go on show alongside paintings and sculpture by the collection’s 20th-century stars and a smattering of older applied arts.
The exhibition launches the gallery’s £5 million Kettle’s Yard Development Appeal which, it is hoped, will fund a new building designed by architect Jamie Fobert housing more gallery space, a café, education space and an extension for the existing library.
www.kettlesyard.co.uk
