Introduction
Enni-Kukka Tuomala is an empathy artist and designer. She was selected by the local North Cambridge community in January 2020 to be the Kettle’s Yard Open House artist in residence and began her residency in March 2020, just as the first lockdown began.
Tuomala has been working with local community groups and individuals collaborating on the Campaign for Empathy x North Cambridge – the world’s first community-centred campaign to promote empathy through art as a powerful tool for fostering a sense of community and connection in a time of physical distancing, social isolation and beyond.
Throughout the residency Tuomala has been working with local residents to creatively explore where empathy lives in North Cambridge and what its role is, and should be, in the lives of the local communities. This collaboration has resulted in a series of artworks, Empathy Objects, which can be found across North Cambridge and at Kettle’s Yard. Inspired by objects and people’s experiences, the Empathy Objects aim to connect the Kettle’s Yard House collections with the local communities in North Cambridge.
“The role of art is to give food for thought, to act as a stimulant, to entice the onlooker to inspect things, people, emotions, from a new point of view.” – H.S. “Jim” Ede, Creator of Kettle’s Yard
1. Four Questions
As you visit the house at Kettle’s Yard you can discover a series of questions, inviting you to take time, pause and reflect, and, if you wish, use the questions to start a conversation with another person.
Inspired by Kettle’s Yard as a space that invites reflection through aesthetics and pleasure, the Four Questions invite a dialogue. Drawing on Tuomala’s Menu for Conversation; an empathy tool intended to help people reach out and connect to others, the questions hope to start a conversation either with yourself, or with those around you. The original menu consists of 12 questions, chosen across a scale of intimacy. Some are lighter ‘starters’, whilst other questions invite more time and contemplation. The important thing is that you get to decide what you want to share.
The questions have been selected by the Open House Community Panel.
The Open House Community Panel
The Open House Community Panel consists of local residents and representatives of local organisations. They select, advise and support the Open House artist in residence throughout their residency and are invited to represent their friends, neighbours and people their support through the project.
The current Open House Community Panel members are:
Alan Soer
Christine Cowling-Jones
Cllr Martin Smart
Golzar Zandi
Shahida Rahman
Helen Harwood
Maria Davies
Jonathan Stanley
Laura Bramley
2. Empathy Pebble
Embodying beauty, truth and the human touch, this object sits on the dining table in the cottage, located in the north of Kettle’s Yard, the closest to our neighbours in North Cambridge, connecting towards the local people who embody the Campaign for Empathy.
When Jim and Helen Ede lived at Kettle’s Yard, the dining table hosted conversation, discussion and informal debate as well as friendship and connection. Hosting and inviting others to connect sits at the centre of the Campaign for Empathy and, as the Empathy Pebble suggests, is the bedrock and the natural ornament of the community.
The original inspiration for this piece is a work by artist and poet, Ian Hamilton-Finlay. Kettle’s Yard’s creator, Jim Ede, met and began corresponding with Hamilton-Finlay in 1964. Although Hamilton-Finlay never visited Kettle’s Yard, he described his fondness of the House in his letters. Using a phrase that reflects upon Ede’s fusion of art and found objects, the inscription reads:
Kettle’s Yard Cambridge England is the Louvre of the Pebble.
The work was especially made for an exhibition, also entitled ‘Open House’, at Kettle’s Yard in 1995. It is placed on the table in the bay window of the dining room in the House and is one of the first objects visitors encounter when entering Kettle’s Yard. By comparing Kettle’s Yard to the Louvre, the famous Parisian museum with its immense collection of art and riches, Hamilton-Finlay draws attention to the fact that in this House pebbles are revered. It encourages the visitor to consider the natural objects in the House with as much attention as the artworks.
Like Hamilton-Finlay, Enni-Kukka Tuomala also draws our attention to the, often under-appreciated, value, significance and beauty of empathy in our communities through the Empathy Pebble. Reimagining the Hamilton-Finlay pebble in a new material and inscribing it with a contemporary message, the Empathy Pebble shares a vision for North Cambridge:
North Cambridge is the Heart of Empathy in the UK.
Giving thanks to the communities that she has collaborated with, Tuomala invites us to slow down and take our time to appreciate the power of empathy.
3. Empathy Diary
The Empathy Diary documents moments of empathy for oneself and for others, as well as the lack of it, in the context of isolation and loneliness.
Kettle’s Yard was home to Jim and Helen Ede from 1957 until 1973. Helen clearly showed deep empathy towards Jim and his passions, as well as the couple’s artist friends, but her own experiences, thoughts and emotional life whilst living in the House are less well known. Jim and Helen moved from London in the 1930s, where they left their children to attend school, to Tangier, before touring the USA and finally residing in Cambridge. In Cambridge, Helen coped with the daily public opening of her home, and the need for Kettle’s Yard to be tidy and perfect at all times, by retreating into the privacy of her own bedroom, the only room in the house with a lock, and the only room not arranged by Jim Ede.
In a period when we have all spent our time retreating in our private spaces, Tuomala has imagined what Helen’s personal life in her bedroom could have been. What might Helen have been thinking and feeling, and how might she have reflected on the world around her?
To create a connection across time between Helen and women in Cambridge today, Tuomala worked with women from Corona House to examine everyday moments of empathy with others, as well as moments of empathy with ourselves. Tuomala invited her collaborators to keep an Empathy Diary, recording their own experiences of empathy, and moments which lacked empathy, in their daily lives. Extracts of their reflections have been compiled to create the Empathy Diary, and are presented in Helen’s bedroom.
Enni-Kukka Tuomala would like to thank her collaborators from Corona House,who provide accommodation and support for women at risk of homelessness, including:
Nat Barden, Maryam Faramarzi, Sarah Nixon, Lynda Lawson & Jill Eastland
4. The Empathy Manifesto
The Empathy Manifesto, presented large-scale on the front of North Cambridge Academy and at Kettle’s Yard, boldly and publicly declares the vision local children and young people have for how empathy will be embedded in their lives, their school and their community.
During the Campaign for Empathy, Tuomala worked with students from North Cambridge Academy and pupils from Arbury Primary School to create the Empathy Manifesto for North Cambridge. Through a series of creative empathy activities, the participants examined what the role of empathy is in their lives today, and what it could be in the future. The final artwork is constructed from the collated words, thoughts and expressions of the children and young people, making a statement of their future in their own words and visual language.
5. Empathy Disc
Understanding and appreciating new and other perspectives is at the core of empathy. Tuomala is inspired by Gregorio Vardanega’s Disc, circa 1960, which is displayed on the bridge at Kettle’s Yard, and frames beautiful and, at times, abstract points of view of the plants located there.
Collaborating with pupils from the Grove Primary School in King’s Hedges, Tuomala invited the children to create their own Empathy Discs as lenses to rediscover the classroom from different perspectives. Made from jam jars and acetate filters of different colours and shapes, these kaleidoscopic viewfinders, created by the pupils, encouraged exploration of light, shapes, materials, and textures. Using the Empathy Discs, the pupils reacquainted themselves with their school and classroom environments, with their new systems and procedures, when they returned following the first lockdown of 2020.
Building on the collaboration with the pupils, Tuomala has now introduced three colourful Empathy Discs across North Cambridge, one in Arbury, one in Kings Hedges and one at Kettle’s Yard. The Empathy Discs play with light, colour and visual perspective, inviting you to look again at our community with altered perceptions.
6. Empathy Pop Up
Arbury Community Centre
Friday 4 June -Saturday 5 June 2021
Join us Arbury Community Centre for the Campaign for Empathy Pop Up!
Here you can:
Collect a copy of the Campaign for Empathy Activity Kits to make at home
See artworks inspired by the Campaign for Empathy created by Cambridge Community Arts
Try out the Menu for Conversation
Pick up Campaign for Empathy posters and badges and be radically empathic!
Find out more about the Campaign for Empathy and discover what we’ve been up to you over the past year.
Join family friendly Campaign for Empathy art activities (Friday: Empathy in Nature workshop with Enni-Kukka Tuomala, Saturday: Empathy banners with Ian Brownlie, Empathy photography with Rachel McGivern and Empathy Chalking with Loreto Valenzuela)
