Introduction
Between June and September 2024, a series of workshops led by independent curator, writer, educator and grower Shama Khanna took place at Kettle’s Yard in which members of our newly inaugurated Community Panel were invited to get to know some of the artworks and other objects in our collection. We used nature as our way in to thinking about the spaces of the Kettle’s Yard house and what is displayed within, and produced a range of spoken, written and drawn responses.
Artist and performer Jade Pollard-Crowe is one member of the Community Panel who participated in the workshops and we are delighted to share two poems she wrote in response to particular prompts. The first piece, immediately below, was written following a visit to a beautiful allotment run by the Cambridge Cyrenians, a charity that provides training and experience to unhoused people through therapeutic horticultural work.

Poem 1
Buildings; they bounce your thoughts back to you. No peaceful pondering, no blustery sweeping up of the tangled questions that enwrap your consciousness, no thundering anger at your audacity to actually think you are the centre.
Every now and then, bricks and mortar whisper the tales of history and it is beautifully articulated / but / there’s is no match for the secrets held by the great oak.
The haunting utterances of 500 years old knowledge carried upon the rustlings of leaves and the gentle snap of twigs. If you listen hard enough, listen from the essential core that lies hidden behind every ego, every socially constructed exterior, lies waiting to be found, to be activated.
Lying within while existing elsewhere, unknown, far and near.
Nature/ Nurture/ Nutrition.
But instead the self concerns itself with buildings.
As Pollard-Crowe explains, the second poem was written because the Community Panel was asked to spend some time considering which objects in the collection were special to them and their communities and why. She chose to focus on the Library space within the Kettle’s Yard house, and what follows is, ‘an imagined scene if I’d been around the table with Jim Ede and others’.

Poem 2
Our collective search for knowledge; for community; for exchanges; for belonging, had been nurtured.
I knew not the people who sat around the table with me yet that evening they knew me better than the rocks and pebbles over which I trod on my daily walks to classes.
It became a sanctuary; a safe haven where ideas could be tested and debate always kind in nature. Mirroring the ephemeral shapes cast around the house as day turned to night, positions shifted, taking on new forms, former certainties became illegible
The differing ports out of which each sea vessel carrying our heterogeneous understandings of the world around us were not dismissed but readily forgotten as we collectively boarded a singular craft. A craft guided by the waves of arts potential for culture-making, textuality, and the important work still to be done.
Co-incidentally, the final workshop took place in the Library in the house, where the panel shared tea made with fresh rosemary picked from the Kettle’s Yard garden.
All texts and images © Jade Pollard-Crowe, 2024.