St Edmund: An Icon of Constant Ecological Change

The natural world has an important presence at Kettle’s Yard, with potted plants, fresh flowers and botanical items on display throughout the house. A jade plant is placed next to a sculpture by George Kennethson in the Dancer Room, a stag horn rests on a ledge beneath the spiral staircase in the cottages and the famous spiral of pebbles swirls beside a work by Henri Gaudier-Brzeska in Jim Ede’s bedroom.

The distinction between the natural and man-made becomes complicated in the sculpture St Edmund, on display in the Lower Extension. One of the most unusual works in the Kettle’s Yard collection, St Edmund is a lightning-charred willow branch placed on a concrete breezeblock. It was given to Jim and Helen Ede by their friend John Catto after he found the branch on the banks of the river Cam. Noticing its human-like appearance, Catto separated the branch from the tree and darkened the new wood that was revealed, otherwise leaving it exactly as he discovered it.

Catto named the piece St Edmund because of its resemblance to medieval depictions of the saint. St Edmund was king of East Anglia from around 855AD until his death fourteen years later at the hands of the invading Vikings, as passed down through the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. Whether he was martyred after refusing to renounce Christ or simply killed in battle is disputed, but either way a popular cult emerged after his death and he was canonised. He is the patron saint of kings, wolves, torture victims and pandemics.

From an environmental perspective, St Edmund has a resonance now which it may not have had when it was created. 1975 was the year when American scientist Wallace Broecker introduced the term ‘global warming’ into the public domain, but it was another 15 years before the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change issued its first report on the devastating effects of man-made emissions.

Nowadays, it’s perhaps hard not to see this branch, burnt to a crisp, at least to some extent as a visual expression of the effects of the climate crisis on trees through wildfires and deforestation.

But what is the meaning of this artwork specifically within a museum collection? Museums are founded on the ideas of permanence and immutability. When artworks and objects are accessioned into museum collections, they are meant to be cared for and preserved in perpetuity.

The Kettle’s Yard house, in particular, is rooted in the idea of stasis – it exists more or less exactly as its founders Jim and Helen Ede created it, even after almost 70 years. The St Edmund sculpture subtly disrupts this assumption. Like other organic objects in the Kettle’s Yard house, it draws attention to impermanence, evolution and decay.

St Edmund was created simultaneously through the natural phenomenon of lightning striking a tree and the human artistic act of titling and preserving the object. With its dual status as human and tree, sculpture and organic object, it confounds the idea of permanence on which museums are premised, instead embodying a state of perpetual ecological change.