For the next five years, a handful of additional works will be on display in the Kettle’s Yard house, enabling us to share new acquisitions and artworks from our collection that are usually in storage with our visitors. Each work has been carefully placed to correspond with existing themes and relationships within the house. Find out more about some of the changes below.
Book a visit to the Kettle’s Yard house this year and see what new things you discover.
1. John Lyons ‘Whip Snake’, 2007
Painter and poet John Lyons (b.1933) explores Trinidadian mythology and beliefs in his work. Lyons moved to the UK to study at Goldsmith’s College, London in the 1950s. After graduating, Lyons worked in teaching, and considers a dialogue with his students as a fundamental part of his artistic practice, echoing the Edes’ conversations with students in Cambridge who visited Kettle’s Yard.
This woodcut depicts a ‘whip snake’, a creature with folkloric significance in Trinidad. The work was acquired in 2023 following the Kettle’s Yard exhibition Paint Like the Swallow Sings Calypso, and you can see it on display in the Lower Extension of the house.
2. Li Yuan-chia, ‘Untitled’, 1968
Li Yuan-chia (1929-1994) was the subject of the 2023 exhibition at Kettle’s Yard Making New Worlds: Li Yuan-chia & Friends, in which this work was included.
Untitled, 1968 is a work that represents Li Yuan-chia’s concern with cosmic and kinetic energies. As Sarah Victoria Turner describes in her essay for the exhibition catalogue:
A number of Li’s works made in the late 1960s seem to gesture towards planetary systems or technologies for cosmological travel. The small hanging magnetic discs he made, floating on fishing wire to enable them to be hung from the ceiling, cluster like stars and planets or small flying saucers.
Similar dynamic, suspended forms exist in the permanent displays at Kettle’s Yard, for instance those by Gregorio Vardanega (Spherical Construction, c. 1963, and Disc, c. 1960) and Kenneth Martin (Screw Mobile, 1969). You can find this object on display in the attic of the house.
3. Avinash Chandra, ‘Black Feast’, 1962
Avinash Chandra (1931-91) met Jim and Helen Ede in the early 1960s, and they became good friends, maintaining a long correspondence. The Edes displayed Black Feast and other works by Chandra in the house in the late 1960s, as the first Kettle’s Yard collections catalogue (published in 1968) shows. The decade was a period of intense artistic development for Chandra. As well as engaging with philosophy in search of a personal form of expression, he sought to reject the influence of the artistic styles he had been taught during his education: the focus on Indian subjects from his years at Delhi Polytechnic as well as forms of western modernism. We are delighted to have this work reinstated in the house. On your next visit you can find it in the Lower Extension.
4. Issam Kourbaj, ‘Urgent archives, written in blood’ (fragment), 2019
This work by Issam Kourbaj (b. 1963) was featured in the artist’s 2024 solo exhibition at Kettle’s Yard, which expired the ongoing conflict in Syria, where Kourbaj was born and lived. The artwork Urgent Archives: Written in Blood formed part of a large installation of works on paper in the exhibition, which references the imprisonment of human rights journalist Mansour Omari. During his incarceration, Omari created a record of his time using pieces of clothing and his own blood. Kourbaj’s installation uses second-hand books. This work is now on display in Helen Ede’s bedroom.
5. Gillian Ayres, ‘Untitled’, 1972
Gillian Ayres (1930-2018) was known for her abstract printmaking and painting. Ayres enrolled at the Camberwell School of Art at age 16, and her first solo exhibition was held in London in 1956. Ayres used a variety of printing techniques including woodcut, etching and monoprint. In her painting she uses multiple layers of acrylic paint. Her friend and curator Tim Hilton said her works included:
A great quantity of paint – a quantity almost too weighty for the host paper or canvas
Ayres played a key role in the development of post-war British abstract art, and she was appointed a CBE in 2011. Ayres’ work is now on display in the Lower Extension of the Kettle’s Yard house.
Explore these artworks, now on display in the Kettle’s Yard house.
