James Dixon, 'The Sinking of the Titanic' (1967)Kettle's Yard Collection

 The closure of Kettle’s Yard for refurbishment has left something of a void in Cambridge’s art scene over the past 18 months. Current first and second year students are largely unaware of the existence of this internationally renowned modern art collection that has been integral to the cultural life of the University for half a century. The inspired curatorial team – rather than putting their feet up and letting the collection gather dust – have mounted pop-up exhibitions across the city. The series – titled ‘In New Places and Spaces’ – has seen works from Kettle’s Yard lighting up sites including the University Library, the Heong Gallery and, now, the Alison Richard Building on the Sidgwick site, where ‘Discovery Through Display’ opened last week. Unusually, this exhibition is curated by a student. Josephine Waugh, a third year Art Historian, developed her affection for Kettle’s Yard writing her first year dissertation on a small painting by Miro from the collection.

Kettle’s Yard is so much more than a modern art museum. Both art repository and home to Jim Ede, a Tate curator, it has the intimate feel of a private collection where, as Ede put it, “young people could be at home unhampered by the great austerity of a museum of public art gallery.” Though no substitute for the unique charm of Kettle’s Yard, the Alison Richard Building is similarly welcoming, offering what Waugh calls ‘the intersection between public and private’. This exhibition sees artworks scattered throughout all four storeys, nestled inconspicuously between notice boards and above workstations.  The building is a melting pot of disciplines, housing both the Department of Politics and International Studies (POLIS) and the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities (CRASSH). Every hour hundreds of academics and students pass through the building’s entrances and exits, filing up and down its zigzagging staircases.  Its walls are often enlivened by rotating exhibitions, with artists drawn from both outside the university and from within the building. Ede believed “the role of art is to give food for thought, to act as a stimulant, to entice the onlooker to inspect things, people, emotions, from a new point of view.” Placed within an academic context, exhibitions such as ‘Discovery Through Display’ can only complement the exchange of ideas and perspectives constantly taking place within the building’s many seminar rooms.

Curator Josephine Waugh experiments with Jim Ede's philosophy of mixing art objects with non-art objects.Claire Haigh

As well as the obvious challenges around safety and light exposure all curators face in non-traditional exhibition spaces, the Alison Richard Building is hardly a blank canvas. The walls are painted a variety of shades and interspersed with institutional furniture. Though Josephine admits this has presented challenges, she has shrewdly exploited these obstacles.  For instance, she has hung James Dixon’s Sinking of the Titanic (1967) on a golden yellow wall, where the minute flecks of yellow in the painting are picked out against the surrounding space.

“exhibitions such as ‘Discovery Through Display’ can only complement the exchange of ideas and perspectives constantly taking place within the building’s many seminar rooms” 

At the exhibition opening, senior curator Dr Jennifer Powell told me: “We are delighted to have supported Josephine to curate the exhibition, which has enabled us to use works from the reserve collection and brought new works by John Blackburn from London.” Seventeen works by Blackburn are on display, ranging from his early examples from the Sixties to recent paintings on loan from the Osbourne Samuel Gallery in London. Blackburn is a British abstract artist whose work Ede tirelessly championed. Now 85, he is Ede’s only artist friend still producing work today. The small-scale works on display, with their translucent blocks of muted colour, have a distinctly meditative, Rothko-like quality. Some, such as White Square with Brown (1963), are painted onto recycled bed linen, an unusual surface texture that can only be appreciated at close range. Other highlights include an abstract drawing by the American surrealist Charles Howard and a beautiful, disorientating little charcoal piece by Bridget Riley.

If you look at nothing else but want a flavour of Kettle’s Yard, please go and peer into the three Perspex boxes in the foyer. Ede, who travelled extensively throughout Europe and Africa, famously collected and arranged ‘found’ natural objects alongside formal artworks – pebbles, bones, feathers – elevating them to the status of art by prompting us to view both kinds of objects in new ways. To him, the spatial and material relationship between objects was just as important as the objects themselves. Across the three boxes, we see the echoing spherical forms of pebbles and an ivory billiard ball juxtaposed against bird feathers and candlesticks. The resulting visual balance is evidently the result of careful selection and meticulous arrangement by the curator. One hopes Ede would approve.

Discovery Through Display is on at the Alison Richards Building, weekdays from 10am-6pm, until 24th March. You can hear curator Josephine Waugh discuss the exhibition in this week's The Vulture Show, available as a free podcast from iTunes.