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We are closed on Bank Holiday Mondays

Please note the house will be temporarily closed for 4 weeks from 14 March 2024

© The Estate of George Kennethson. Photo: Kettle's Yard

Sculpture

Construction (Birds), 1966 (circa)

George Kennethson
Staffordshire alabaster (carving)
290 x 202 x 153 mm
[GK 1]
On display

About the artist

Born 1910 – Died 1994

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George Kennethson studied painting at the Royal Academy in London (1928–34), before turning to sculpture in 1937 under the influence of Henry Moore. It was then that he developed his exclusive devotion to direct carving in stone, one of the canons of modernist sculpture.

Kennethson favoured English limestones for his works, although he occasionally used marble and alabaster (as in the works at Kettle’s Yard). Regardless of the material used, he believed that materials should retain their characteristics and not attempt to look like something they are not. His carvings, in the sculptor’s words, should be regarded “not as a specific illusionism, but as an expressive, harmonised relationship of planes, masses, weights and proportions to give life to an idea”.

Most of Kennethson’s sculptures are based on a small number of subjects: birds, the sea, the countryside and the human body. The artist explained his interest in birds in an interview: “They [the sculptures] are generally of birds alighting, or in flight or at take-off. I suppose surely almost everyone is fascinated by birds and the flight of birds … it is really to do with freedom. You have sympathy with something moving in a different medium, the air; the feeling of life in another dimension.” It is especially in a cold winter light that the sculpture, placed by Jim Ede against a large window, acquires a yellowish-pink hue suggestive of the kind of movement mentioned by Kennethson. The translucency of alabaster, in particular, creates a play of light which gives the block a sense of weightlessness.

The sculptor and his wife Eileen came to know the Edes shortly after they arrived in Cambridge in 1957. Kennethson’s determination in the pursuit of his work impressed Ede, who became an important supporter. The two men also shared an enthusiasm for the work of Henri Gaudier-Brzeska and Constantin Brancusi. Ede wrote of Construction (Birds): “The alabaster carving is a great asset to the house. It is a happy demonstration of form which does not spoil the material used, but brings out a beautiful and varied light as it passes through the stone. It makes of simple forms a block, containing and diffusing this light, the whole held together by the magic of sculpture.”

Provenance: purchased by H.S. (Jim) Ede from the artist, c. 1968.

'Construction (Birds)' on display at Kettle's Yard

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