Sludgy Portrait of Himself: Jesse Wine at the Museum of Cambridge

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Kettle’s Yard is celebrating 50 years since the gift of Kettle’s Yard to the University of Cambridge with ten exhibitions in new places and spaces. For one of these exhibitions Kettle’s Yard has invited Jesse Wine to create an installation at the Museum of Cambridge. The Museum is Kettle’s Yard’s neighbour, housed in a seventeenth century timber-framed building, formerly a pub, the wonderfully eclectic collections are displayed in nine themed rooms across three floors.

For this project, Wine invites visitors to the Museum of Cambridge to embark on an alternative, immersive journey through the Museum’s spaces.

Playing on the familiar form of the museum audio tour, Wine brings together objects with spoken word, music and an intervention in the Museum’s lighting system to spin a new narrative that subverts the usual experience of viewing. Drawing inspiration both from the Museum’s eclectic collection of objects that chart the history of local society, from vacuum cleaners to voodoo dolls, and the rich and murky, or ‘sludgy’, history of folklore in Cambridgeshire’s fenland landscape, Wine’s re-appropriation blurs the boundaries of fact and fiction, time and place.

Wine takes particular interest in the story of Joseph Hempsell, a ‘fen slodger’ who disappeared in mysterious circumstances in the watery depths of the fens before returning as a ghost. His story will play out through new works by Wine, as well as objects from the collections of the Museum of Cambridge and Kettle’s Yard, selected by the artist, including works by Max Ernst, Henri Gaudier-Brzeska and Ben Nicholson. In the spirit of Jim Ede’s renowned personal tours of the Kettle’s Yard House, Wine takes on the role of narrator in the audio tour and guides visitors on a unique journey through the Museum, dipping into folklore, contemporary culture and art history. The audio tour is produced in collaboration with London based musician Daniel Woolhouse.

To feature in particular are new ceramic tableaux works by Wine that comprise disconnected sections of shoes, socks and amorphous forms mounted on tiles, which when considered together suggest a surrealist reclining figure. Through the narrative and in bringing together these works with other seemingly disparate objects, Wine considers his intervention as a whole as a surrealist gesture.