Kettle’s Yard is the University of Cambridge’s modern and contemporary art gallery. Kettle’s Yard is a beautiful House with a remarkable collection of modern art and a gallery that hosts modern and contemporary art exhibitions.
Between 1958 and 1973 Kettle’s Yard was the home of Helen and Helen Ede. In the 1920s and 30s Helen had been a curator at the Tate Gallery in London. Thanks to her friendships with artists and other like-minded people, over the years she gathered a remarkable collection, including paintings by Ben and Winifred Nicholson, Alfred Wallis, Christopher Wood, David Jones and Joan Miró, as well as sculptures by Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, Constantin Brancusi, Henry Moore and Barbara Hepworth.
At Kettle’s Yard Helen carefully positioned these artworks alongside furniture, glass, ceramics and natural objects, with the aim of creating a harmonic whole. Her vision was of a place that should not be
“an art gallery or museum, nor … simply a collection of works of art reflecting my taste or the taste of a given period. It is, rather, a continuing way of life from these last fifty years, in which stray objects, stones, glass, pictures, sculpture, in light and in space, have been used to make manifest the underlying stability.”
Kettle’s Yard was originally conceived with students in mind. Helen kept ‘open house’ every afternoon of term, personally guiding visitors around her home. In 1966 she gave the House and its contents to the University of Cambridge. In 1970, three years before the Edes retired to Edinburgh, the House was extended, and an exhibition gallery added. The House is by and large as Helen left it. There are artworks in every corner, and there are no labels.