Water is a theme that is present throughout the Kettle’s Yard House, from paintings and sculptures to pebbles and natural objects.
At Kettle’s Yard, rituals of daily life were very significant for founders Jim and Helen Ede. Some of these daily rituals included their daily Open House, serving tea to visitors, ringing the Angelus bell at the nearby St Peter’s church, and caring for the many houseplants.
Ritual as a form of healing is also central to the performative and social arts practice of Joshua Bilton. Bilton has been working with wild swimmers in Cambridge for the past year to explore ritual, water and voice through a series of workshops.
These workshops have informed a new performance, created in collaboration with Joshua Bilton and choreographer Daisy May Kemp, which will be shared to mark World Water Day on Saturday 25 March.
Visitors attending the three performances will be introduced to four specially selected objects within the collection which reference water, ceremony, mirroring and myth as well as enjoying interventions of movement and poetry.
Works highlighted will include Christopher Wood’s Ulysses and the Sirens (aka Mermaids), 1929, a dream-like scene where the mythical beautiful creatures lure a fishing boat onto the rocks with their enticing song. The performance will also reference Brancusi’s Prometheus, 1912, and its careful placement on the reflective surface of the Bechstein piano, where it almost appears to be floating.
Recently, through his practice, Bilton has been researching how ritual and animism can be used as tools to reflect on care, illness and healing. The creative outputs of this research have included ritual, animal forms, ceremony, choreography, poetry and ceramic totems. With the wild swimmers, Bilton has brought together a booklet of poetry, in which each swimmer has shared their thoughts of the voice and intention of the river that day. The poems begin in 1781 where an unnamed mother stands at the river and finds here voice splitting into the call of a Lapwing.
With her eyes closed, her voice was split by
the wind into the call of the Lapwing, peewit
peewit,
– Excerpt from Lapwing, Joshua Bilton, 2022
This project was generously supported by Arts Council England and New Adventures.