This exhibition presents artist John Kelly’s field explorations on two very contrasting islands, beginning in the young lava fields of Surtsey, Iceland, and ending among the time-worn rocks and erosional surfaces of Barra in the Outer Hebrides, Scotland.

On display are field sketches and objects collected from both islands, complemented by journal entries John made during his trips.

Using wildlife of the past to guide conservation of the future

This exhibition will use UK butterfly specimens from our collections to showcase the natural world and environmental change. It highlights the research that conservationists today are undertaking to reverse long-term declines, including people based here in the Museum. 

One of the most influential artists of our time, David Hockney (b.1937) takes over Cambridge this spring and summer with an exhibition across The Fitzwilliam Museum and The Heong Gallery, Downing College.

Through both traditional and cutting-edge ways of making art, the exhibition explores Hockney’s obsession with how we see the world, and how our world of time and space can be captured on the surface of a flat picture.

Known for his resilience, leadership skills and loyalty to his crew, in even the direst of circumstances, Sir Ernest Henry Shackleton contributed greatly to the exploration of the Antarctic. In recent years, his legacy has influenced training programmes on the art of leadership and crisis management.

Kettle’s Yard is pleased to announce a new solo exhibition by internationally renowned Chinese artist Ai Weiwei (b. 1957, Beijing) in which new and existing work will be shown alongside historic Chinese objects. The exhibition will explore notions of truth, authenticity and value, as well as globalisation, the coronavirus pandemic and the current geopolitical crisis. Ai Weiwei will reflect upon the liberty in the West, in contrast to China and other authoritarian regimes, to question truth and authority, express doubt and seek transparency in political matters.

Kettle’s Yard is delighted to be one of several institutions around the world celebrating the twenty-fifth anniversary of Ivorypress, a renowned publisher of artists’ books based in Madrid.

Join us for a late-night opening of Sutapa Biswas: Lumen at Kettle’s Yard. Explore the exhibition after hours, enjoy a drink and have fun.

Drawing on Sutapa Biswas’ collaborative practice, the evening will bring together a range of artists, organisers and creative practitioners to reflect on the themes that underpin her solo exhibition Sutapa Biswas: Lumen at Kettle’s Yard.

Animal Afterlives: a photography exhibition on taxidermy by Alexandra Murphy

Natural history museums display and store preserved animals in such a way that they, at first glance, appear to be living, but in reality they are lifeless and fixed in position. When these specimens are photographed, their stillness becomes further frozen in time. Alexandra Murphy has photographed different taxidermy specimen collections in UK and US museums,

in an exploration of the photograph’s relationship with preservation, representation, life and death, past and present.

The show will foreground Biswas’s vital contributions to the Black Arts Movement in Britain and to the shifting understanding of post-war British art. Biswas’s works visually disrupt, challenge and reimagine our present time: visual theorist Griselda Pollock said that it was Biswas who ‘forced us all to acknowledge the Eurocentric limits of the discourses within which we practise’.