Welcome to the Kettle’s Yard Pebble Challenge

Explore artworks, objects and ideas from the Kettle’s Yard Collection to create your own art. Each pebble marks an activity to make and do at home, using the things you find around your house. On this page you can find useful links to help you with the challenge and questions and quotes to think about.

Share your creations using #PebbleChallenge or email us with feedback learning@kettlesyard.cam.ac.uk

You can download the Pebble Challenge here

Introducing: The Pebble Challenge from Kettle’s Yard on Vimeo.

Once you’ve downloaded the Pebble Challenge pack use these extra resources and links to help you complete each challenge.

Week 1

Pebble 1: What is Kettle’s Yard?

• Explore the Virtual Tour to see Kettle’s Yard from home

Pebble 2: Bright Lemons

• Hear what other children think about the lemon in this recording
• What difference can a bright-coloured lemon make?

Pebble 3: Winifred Nicholson’s Rainbow

• Read our blog post about rainbows at Kettle’s Yard
• What colours would you use to describe the view from your bedroom window?

“Colour is seen in growing things, living the life of the rainbow curve, the sevenfold spectrum. Flowers create colours out of the light of the sun, refracted by the rainbow prism. So I paint flowers, but they are not botanical or photographic flowers. My paintings talk in colour and any of the shapes are there to express colour but not outline. The flowers are sparks of light, built of and thrown out into the air as rainbows are thrown, in an arc.”  – Winifred Nicholson, ‘Three Kinds of Artist’, 1974

Pebble 4: Secret Communication

• Have a look at our Space resource

Pebble 5: Twirling Mobile

• Try our Art To Go video at home
• Explore our Light resource

Pebble 6: Drawing from Memory

• Learn about Alfred Wallis’ ‘Five Ships’ painting
• You can also look at this drawing he did

Week 2

Pebble 7: Dancing Shadows

• Can you join in and recreate ‘The Dancer’ pose like this?
• Learn more about this artwork in our New Rhythms Pack

Pebble 8: A Circle of Patterns

• Find out more about Lucie Rie’s Bowl

Pebble 9: Plinth Practice

• Read about the basket of pebbles here
• For more information head to pages 14-15 in our Nature resource

‘It is perhaps strange that great sculptures should have many of the qualities which are found in pebbles – the smoothly rounded forms – the sense they have of evolving – the pebble out of the action of the elements and the statue out of the power of the human mind’ –  Jim Ede

Pebble 10: Font-tastic!

• Can you turn words into pictures?
• Read this blog for some inspiration

Pebble 11: Abstract Lines

• What makes a face unique?
• Head to pages 39-41 of our Light resource

Week 3

Pebble 12: Colour-block landscapes

• How does a place make you feel? Can you share that using colour?
• Learn more about ‘1962 (Argos)’ by Ben Nicholson

Pebble 13: Shape Poem

• Learn about Ian Hamilton Finlay’s pebble on pages 16-17 of the Nature resource
• Watch this film on Ian Hamilton Finlay’s ‘Sparta’
• Explore this teaching resource on Ian Hamilton Finlay

Pebble 14: The Power of Perspective

• What can perspective do to a photograph?
• Look at pages 39-41 of our Space resource

Pebble 15: Stringing Sculpture

• What shapes can you discover when you’re out and about?
• Watch this video on Naum Gabo
• Turn to pages 21-24 in our Space resource

Pebble 16: Cardboard Canvas

Week 4

Pebble 17: Light Distortions

• Can you make an object change shape just by looking at it?
• Listen to this recording about Gregorio Vardanegas Disc
• Watch the Kettle’s Yard webcam

Pebble 18: Panel Pieces

• Look at pages 36-39 in our Nature resource 

Pebble 19: Shape Printing

• If you were a shape, what shape would you be?
• Look at this letter from Richard Pousette-Dart to Jim Ede:

Pebble 20: Jim’s Windows

• What changes can you capture in the view from your window?
• How can you direct light to fall where you want it to?
• Look at page 7 in our Light resource

Pebble 21: Sorting Spirals

• What is your idea of a perfect arrangement?
• Listen to Brook, aged 8, talk about the objects on Jim’s table in this recording

‘I have always been fascinated by pebbles…in flowers too, and in shells. Such things have been for me a sudden contact with the miraculous – as if an angel were to take you by the hand.’ – Jim Ede

‘You may search a wide seashore or the reaches of many rivers and never find one, and then suddenly it lies before you…We find a perfect pebble once in a generation and once in a continent perhaps.’ – Jim Ede

Congratulations on completing your Pebble Challenge

We hope to welcome you in person at Kettle’s Yard soon. Until then, please keep sharing your creations with us on social media using #PebbleChallenge or email learning@kettlesyard.cam.ac.uk.