Back in 2005 artist Beth Cullen Kerridge and her husband Tom faced a now-or-never moment. They had been married five years, Tom working as a chef with Gary Rhodes among others and Beth the assistant to the great British sculptor Sir Anthony Caro. The plan when they first got together after a swept-off-their-feet romance was for Tom to earn enough money cooking for Beth to have her own studio. They moved to Norfolk in 2004 to try to make that happen but the money was not quite enough for it to work, and they felt they were going a little crazy out near Norwich. The choice in 2005 was either for Tom, at 33, to get a work-all-hours job as head chef in a London hotel, or to go it alone. The turning point in that decision was a roundabout in Stoke-on-Trent, Beth’s home town.
She was commissioned to do four sculptures on a traffic island, and with the money, plus “the help of an army of friends and family” and a bank loan, they decided to set up a pub restaurant, the Hand and Flowers in Marlow. “Just really,” she says now, “so we could begin to make our own decisions.”
She is telling me this at a gallery under some railway arches in Hoxton, east London, which is exhibiting the first solo show of her sculptures. “When we opened the Hand and Flowers,” she says, “I said I’d give up art for three years and help get the business going because I knew he couldn’t do all of it on his own.” In the end it has taken her nine years to get fully back to her own work, in which time the Hand and Flowers has become the first gastro pub to be awarded two Michelin stars, and Tom has become a “next generation TV chef” with his own show. Beth’s own work, long on the back burner, now on display in the gallery, is in part a reflection on the tougher years of that journey and that partnership.
Since her 40th birthday, when Tom bought her some studio time and marble at the Carrara quarry in Italy, where Michelangelo used to work, Beth has been making a series of striking and beautiful sculptures of empty shirts and ties. Some of the sculptures are sinuous polished marble, with broad collars poised to strike, cobra-like; some are cast-bronze button-downs with shark fins at the back; the gallery is dominated by a huge crucifix bronze dress shirt, 20 feet high. All of them are dedicated to the bankers who back in 2007 and 2008 not only bankrupted the world’s economy but also, in Marlow, almost drove the Hand and Flowers, and all the couple were working for, to the wall.
For the first couple of years at the pub it was just Tom in the kitchen with a couple of chefs and Beth, plus a barman and a waitress, out front. The couple lived upstairs, an arrangement which, Beth notes, came to an end one morning when Tom “came in to show me how fresh this big piece of fish was while I was in the shower. I said, ‘That’s it we are moving’. We got a tiny cottage and I built a shed at the back and tried to work there for a bit.”
In an effort to improve the cash flow at the Hand and Flowers – despite the fact it had won a Michelin star the year after opening – they renovated a couple of cottages across the car park where diners could stay (as anyone who has eaten the perfect, trencherman’s food at the pub would attest, this looks a profoundly sensible post-prandial option). It was when a tumbledown cottage next door came up for sale that the problems started.
Sitting outside the gallery now with a coffee, Beth gets quite emotional just thinking about it. “We were ticking over nicely,” she says, “though we had stretched ourselves quite hard. The Hand and Flowers worked and it was full. The bank we were dealing with – I won’t say which one because they are all as bad – came in quite aggressively and suggested we took a whole loan on for the cottage that had come up. Before we signed for it I said, ‘This is going to kill us if you don’t also give us the money to do it up.’ They said no problem, of course.”
So they bought the cottage and that was the last they heard from their banker. Credit had crunched, calls were never returned, and they had a big loan for a cottage they could not afford to renovate and which suddenly no one wanted to buy. The margins were so tight making the kind of food that Tom was making – food that won him the Great British Menu main course two years running – that the extra burden of the mortgage without income almost took them under. “For a couple of years,” Beth says, “I didn’t sleep at all. I tried to keep Tom away from it and tried to squeeze enough money from the business to do the cottage up.” All the while she was quietly building up a creative rage against men in shirts and ties sitting across desks, saying no. “Planning permission – those guys were buggers, too. Building regs guys. As well as the banks. They all stitched us for about three years. There was one Christmas I didn’t know if we’d be there come January. VAT day is New Year’s Eve. And I didn’t know if I would be able to pay both the VAT and the staff.”
Beth, who was trying to balance the books and leave her husband to work his honest creative magic in the kitchen, became an expert juggler in those days, and she discovered who their friends were. Negotiating a day or two out of suppliers. Asking favours of staff and friends. Some of that collaboration, she believes, still shows itself at the restaurant, the sense of everyone always having been in it together, the mark of great service. “The Hand has a nice periphery of family. Everyone who works there has a love of the place and feels a responsibility towards it. Which is brilliant for me now because I can go off for a day or two to the studio or go off to Italy for a week or two.”
The work itself, those finely crafted stuffed shirts, grew out of frustration not anger, she says. “It always felt a bit like ‘grind it out or give in’.” She was, of course, not alone in this sentiment during this period. “I’ve even heard Heston [Blumenthal] say the same thing,” she says. “You know, the day he got his second star all he could think about was whether he could pay his staff the next day. I see it all over in this business. There is a look that people have in their eyes. These days, now things are better, we try hard to support people ourselves if we can.”
It was a look that Beth had first seen back at home as a child. Her father was an artist, a painter with a pottery business, selling craftware. She learnt some of her sculptural skills from him, and a sense of what big-hearted family business might involve. “It was all hands on deck if we had a big order, all of us would wrap and pack.” The pottery business went bust in the recessions of the Thatcher era. “The whole of Stoke-on-Trent was decimated,” she recalls. “The coal industry, the steel industry. It created this place with no identity.”
Her father picked himself up and began another business, successfully running a care home. He is 72 now and comes out to Carrara with her and they carve together, “which is a completely lovely thing. There are three full-time artisans there at the quarry day in day out. Five or six artists constantly there. At midday a big load of pasta comes out, they find a big chunk of marble for a table and dig in. It’s a wonderful communal thing.”
I wonder if, doing the work, she has got that frustration with financiers out of her system?
“Almost,” she says with a laugh. “I am doing some suits now. I have an evil doctor I am working on. An empty doctor with lots of pens in the pocket. I have had a couple of bad experiences with doctors – I had a terrible hernia induced by an operation I’d had and one doctor told me I had to wear a girdle for the rest of my life. I wasn’t even 40 then. So I have him in mind…”
They are all men, these soulless figures?
“Some might not be. I wanted it so everyone would understand it from all walks of life. The great thing about the show is I’ve had all sorts of people drop in, people coming down from up north specifically to see it. I had someone from Darlington come down with her dad. Some have had a laugh, others have been vilely angry about what the work represents.”
For her, the wait and the struggle to make the work was worth it. “I’d worked for Caro for so long, when it came to do it myself I was initially just making rubbish versions of his work, welding found objects together. The fact was, I needed a little bit of something to say. He used to tell me if you want to change your art change your habits, so I went back to basics.”
Though they try to respect each other’s domains these days, her husband is, annoyingly, her best critic. “He will pick on what I know are the bad things straight away,” she says. “His dad was a draughtsman and Tom can always see when something isn’t right.” She gets her own back in the kitchen. “New dishes are worked on for six months, we obviously all have a taste before it goes into real production. I’ll tend to notice if a plate is too bright or whatever. It’s a team effort always.”
When I visit the gallery, Tom is showing his friend and contemporary star chef Jason Atherton and his family around the show. He is very much the proud husband, pleased he kept his side of the bargain in the end. He obviously did some of the best private-view food around for the opening, but mostly he tries to let his wife take centre stage. “I have been outside it all along and watched the work grow,” he says, “I can’t tell you how great it is to see it, knowing what Beth has achieved to get here.”
He must have been under some pressure when that original three-year plan extended beyond its expected course?
He laughs. “It took a bit longer than was originally planned, certainly. But these bigger pieces Beth is making needed a maturity. I suppose a bit like the Hand and Flowers – I mean the restaurant is 10 years old but it is only now I really feel its strength somehow.”
I wonder if his own experience of the compulsive art of cooking helped him understand his wife’s frustration at not being able to express herself in those years?
“Absolutely. You don’t necessarily have to be in the kitchen as a chef, cooking the meat and fish every day, but it’s your identity. That was the same with Beth. We constantly have this conversation: for me, being a chef is not artistic exactly, it’s building blocks of work; it’s more of an artisan activity, like a carpenter making a perfect table. With Beth I think it is something like the same thing. She is not doing video art or trying to shock or whatever, she is working with clay and with stone and metal. I always think it’s a bit like making bread, completely handmade.”
Is it a shared enterprise in that sense?
“No,” he says. “We try to keep the Hand and Flowers and Beth Cullen Sculpture separate. I mean, we were two separate people when we first met and fell in love with each other and that was partly I think because we felt we could really support each other in what we wanted to do.”
It’s taken a while, you might say, but as in all the best partnerships they worked out how to get there in the end.
