Kettle's Yard, University of Cambridge – serie

Winifred Nicholson (1893-1981) is one of the most important and best loved artists in the Kettle’s Yard collection. Nicholson met Kettle’s Yard founder Jim Ede in 1924, and they kept in regular contact over the following decades. Ede credited Winifred Nicholson directly for ‘[teaching] me much about the fusing of art and daily living’ and at Kettle’s Yard he built the largest public collection of her work.This book brings together some of Nicholson’s most eloquent essays with extracts from previously unpublished letters between the artist and Ede, and the words of their mutual friends, the poet Kathleen Raine and collector Helen Sutherland. With an introduction by curator Elizabeth Fisher exploring Nicholson’s relationship with Ede, the book is richly illustrated and included reproductions of all works in the collection, a biography and bibliography.

This publication marks the 2018 exhibition Actions. The image of the world can be different, the first exhibition to be held in at the new Kettle’s Yard following its redevelopment.The exhibition is inspired by a letter Naum Gabo wrote to Herbert Read in 1944, in which Gabo reasserts the potential of art as a poetic, social and political force in the world and his belief that “the image of the world can be different”. Actions reflects the energising diversity and breadth of art in the modern and contemporary period within the UK and internationally.Bringing together work across a variety of forms and media made by artists of different generations from the emerging to the renowned, the exhibition features work by 38 artists including nine new commissions by Rana Begum, Jeremy Deller, eL Seed, Idris Khan, Issam Kourbaj, Harold Offeh, Melanie Manchot, Cornelia Parker and Caroline Walker.