A childhood memoir and all about pebbles…
Detail of a window at Kettle’s Yard
I have been reading a wonderful memoir of a Cambridge childhood by the artist Gwen Raverat. It was recommended to me by the guide when I recently visited Kettle’s Yard in Cambridge. It’s so vivid – she writes with such perfect recall of what it was like; she manages to be both an adult reflecting on childhood experience as well as the child witnessing it, which I think is a remarkable feat. I was particularly struck by this paragraph – because it encapsulates perfectly that passionate interest in small things, objects, feelings which as she says, drives the artist. I know just what she means, and it’s how I feel about the house I live in, which was my parents home.
“the path in front of the veranda was made of large round water-worn pebbles….I adored those pebbles. I mean literally adored; worshipped. This passion made me feel quite sick sometimes. And it was adoration that I felt for the foxgloves at Down and for the stiff red clay out of the Sandwalk clay-pit; and for the beautiful white paint on the nursery floor. This kind of feeling hits you in the stomach, and in the ends of your fingers, and it is probably the most important thing in life. Long after I have forgotten all my human loves, I shall still remember the smell of a gooseberry leaf, or the feel of the wet grass on my bare feet; or the pebbles in the path. In the long run it is this feeling that makes life worth living, this which is the driving force behind the artist’s need to create”
And this links perfectly to the much photographed collection of 76 perfect pebbles arranged in a careful spiral by Jim Ede at Kettle’s Yard.
“I will discard 10,000 in my search for one whose outward shape exactly balance my idea of what a pebble is … you may search a wide seashore or the reaches of many rivers and never find one, and then suddenly it lies before you – an ordered unit, shaped of this order from the countless vicissitudes of nature’s course… We find a perfect pebble once in a generation and once in a continent perhaps.”
Jim Ede
There is something so satisfying about the weight of a pebble in the hand; perhaps it is one of the earliest shared memories - what child hasn’t picked up a pebble and felt its smooth roundness, how it sits in the palm? We used to bring large flat pebbles home from the beach sometimes to paint. I still have one that my Mum painted and varnished. And here is a lovely piece about stones and ritual by Jackie Morris who creates spirals and labyrinths on stones, to be left in special places, to be scoured by the wind and weather. And now I’m taken back to a memory of a wonderful exhibition by Sue Lawty at the V & A. She made marks with hundreds, thousands of stones, all collected and ordered and considered.
"To pick up a rock, is to touch base. Touching stones gives us a primal, spiritual connection with the earth. When we handle a stone, we hold in our hands a small drawing, a tiny piece of the map; we are holding time."