Maria Balshaw on Creative Rebellion, Life After the Tate & The House as a Container

37:41Maria Balshaw:Because I love cut flowers, but I hate the way that they're grown and imported and don't have any connection to where they came from. And I think one of the things for me about Kent is that, you know, the cliches about it being a garden of England are true. Even now there's still a lot of fruit orchards here and things grow in season here and during May and June there were always roadside sellers with the excess of cherries being sold off by a farmer and then pears later in the season. So connecting to that seasonal change is really important to me and we eat out, our table is right outside the back door and we have an outdoor oven.

38:28Maria Balshaw:It's not as evolved as that amazing outdoor kitchen that Dan has but we live outside yeah and as I said to you earlier my mother lived here as she was dying of cancer and she had that really amazing pandemic summer that we all experienced or early spring into summer and so she was sitting outside really from the first of April right through to mid-September when she passed away sitting out on the terrace taking the sunshine and watching the tulips unfold to start with and then the roses coming and the peonies and then the marigolds and then the sunflowers and then everything turning rusty coloured and the swifts arriving and departing again and all of that.

39:20Maria Balshaw:And I think that's the counterbalance to a job and a life that is very indoors and you keep light out of museums and it's very urban and I need that balance. You talked about your mum there. So she came to live with you for the last part of her life. That must have been very special for you actually to have her with you for the last part like that. I mean, can you describe that looking back on that now? What was that like for you? I mean, I think it was the most extraordinary gift for me because as I say she stayed in my childhood home lived in it for the rest until that last phase where she came here in Northampton and I had run away from Northampton and not out of bad childhood feeling but out of just not wanting that and I never went back I mean I went to university I never I didn't even have a short period of living back at home perhaps the longest time I ever spent in that house again might have been four days perhaps and mum and dad were very encouraging and proud and appreciative of all the things that I did and that my brother has done in his life but I think especially for me they didn't they didn't know very much about what I really did and and I think there was I to go back to that childhood kind of word I think there's she she's quite unusual they might um and when mum came and lived here we were all living in this very unusual way and of being um kept at home but having to keep our jobs going and so tape was being run from our from my kitchen and my other senior colleagues kitchens or bedrooms or studies um and it was deeply weird and but it meant that my mother and got to see and hear what my job was really like okay so um one of my favorite memories is that my the chair of tate at that point was lionel barber who was then editor of the ft and he's a big man and very forceful individual and we'd be on zooms or um a board meeting might be on teams and my mum would be sitting outside and there'd be a pause in the meeting and i'd take a cup of tea and she said that was lyon wasn't it his booming voice i always recognized that and it made me giggle so much because she was sort of bringing this really important man down to her size but she was an adult alongside me as an adult which is an experience you hardly ever get with your parents um and she came to and sort of understand so much more deeply what had what my adult life was like and what had driven me and she ended up being also able to give me I think much more profound advice and and in the very last weeks I remember her saying should you work very hard I can see what a good job you do and it's really incredible um but remember um she had all the other parts of your life um and and i talked about walking earlier and the pilgrim's way runs very close to here and it's an 11 mile walk to canterbury and my husband nick and i did that when mom was living with us um left her for a day and when we came back she said that's she said that's it when she'd remember you and Nick need time to walk the Kamino way.

43:14Maria Balshaw:And she and her dad had driven that in an earlier part of their life. And she said, make sure that you make time for all the things, was the advice she left me with. What do you think of that? Well, that's why I'm stepping down from Tate. Just at this point, having done, say, nearly a decade of an incredible job, which I love and, you know, all that we get to do is quite extraordinary and demanding and very time intensive. And, you know, you're never not the director of an organisation like Tate. So you can have holidays, but, you know, the organisation is always still running. And it's time now that I have a bit more time for all the other things.

44:04Maria Balshaw:and I'm going to, I'm stopping on the 31st of March and on the 1st of April I'll be standing outside in my wellies and that's the beginning of the vegetable growing season proper and I want to be around to watch the seedlings push their way through, transplant them properly, not have to do it in a rush or in the dark which I quite often do at the moment because I've run out of time to transplant whatever I've grown. I'll be able to do it in a more measured way. And I might get bored of that next year or the year after, but I know this summer that is going to be my purpose. That's brilliant. Good for you.

44:51My father died of cancer around a similar sort of time as your mum. Out of interest, what did that experience tell you about what's important? because it does tell you something, doesn't it? What have you taken from it on that level?

45:06Maria Balshaw:I mean, I think it teaches you a huge amount, partly because we're not close enough to death in our kind of contemporary period. And mum being here and passing here just with some visits from community nurses was a little bit like being dropped into an extended episode of call the midwives in a good way and we need more of that because we are going to be an aging population and much better care towards the end of life I think would make a huge difference and alongside that the importance of being present so we didn't know how long and mum would have to live as you don't with that kind of cancer and everybody wasn't able to travel easily.

46:06Maria Balshaw:So with my children who had spent a lot of time with my mum when they were growing up because I worked full time and mum had retired by then and so she was very hands-on grandmother. We agreed that they would come for a week each month in that period and that they'd have kind of a letter so that they could travel um and this how many months will we do that i said well we don't know so we'll just do let's just say one week this month and then the next month we can have another week and this and i hadn't because i was i was panicking and and grieving as well as trying to be organized and it was actually just such a wonderful thing to do because it was just oh this is the week the children are coming mom and they knew they were coming and and there was they were sad so how will we manage our feelings and I said you don't have to manage your feelings you just have to be with nanny for one week um and so the presence of family but also chosen family so various friends that knew my mom came and did the same and as we moved into July and August we were all able to move around a bit more and and the commitment to just time with people that was what I really took from it and in an in a structured but unstructured way and and what did what did you take from it I'd say something very similar which is um the just the importance of your human relationships I mean I looked at my father and I thought your legacy of course is your family and actually you know he was uh he was a fantastic architect and he he built things and he has physical manifestations of himself and his work around the place but actually I think you live on in those social relationships that's what I feel and I also think like you were saying it gets back to the the fundamentals of somehow the the rhythms of the natural world I think you know and I love the vision of your mum being outside with the sun on her face looking at the garden watching the birds you know I think it's those rhythms we're all in in rhythm with the natural world somehow and and I think it's about accepting our place in that much wider ecosystem yeah and certainly this landscape gave me this what i needed in that period um and as i said mom was with us because dad who had been she cared for him after a series of strokes for a decade um and then she got cancer and he had to go into a home whilst she was having a first phase of her treatment and he just hated it.

49:05Maria Balshaw:As soon as he wasn't being cared for as part of the family, he deteriorated. And when the homes closed because of COVID, I remember him ringing me and saying, I don't like this virus thing. I'm not having this. And he passed away about 10 days later. I think he just stopped fighting any longer. and mum came because she hadn't got those caring responsibilities and she was surprisingly willing to leave her context in Northampton where she had great friends and wonderful support networks but she wanted to be with family and she went back a few times to visit her friends and a few of them came here and we were all glad that that was able to happen.

49:58Maria Balshaw:My brother and his daughter and wife came too. But when she lay in her bedroom, which looks out over the valley where the sun sets, she would see these buzzards and it is a pair of buzzards and they're still here. They mate for life. They circle this valley. And she decided that the buzzard that she could see was dad and that the other one that sometimes joined it was going to be her. Oh, bless her. And it just, and sometimes, I mean, especially towards the end, she was on Morphine for the Pain. And I remember Nick coming down and saying, do you think there are buzzards? Because, you know, she could be making this up.

50:42Maria Balshaw:And I said, no, no, I see them too sometimes. And sometimes she clearly was making them up, but they were a necessary metaphor for the transition she was making. Yeah, so lovely. Can I ask you about Nick? How did you guys meet and how long have you been together? We've been together now for nearly 21 years. And we're both second married. So we met sort of midlife. Both of us had had two children and were coming out of the relationships that we were in. And we met as friends first. on, I mean, it's comically embarrassing, really, on a cultural leadership programme that was set up by Dame Vivian Duffield, who is funding the wonderful garden at Tate Britain.

51:34Maria Balshaw:She set up this programme called the Claw Leadership Programme to develop the leaders for the future. And her explicit wish was to make sure that when Nick Sirota retired, there would be sufficient trained arts leaders in the UK to take on his role and so she was extremely pleased when I was appointed um but we were he was a museum professional again but also an academic he'd worked at UCL as well as the Museum of London and we were quite unlikely um combination I think to start with because I definitely read him as very traditional when I first met him museum professional archaeologist with his trowel and he definitely read me as some kind of flighty contemporary art girl um um uh but we're both from the west midlands um and as we got to know each other as friends um we had another friend associated you two seem to have private jokes what is that about um and his family lived in certain coalfield and mine were over in smithick and bearwood and dudley um which is where his dad had originally come from but he'd gone up in the world and of course certain coalfield calls itself the royal borough and you know the likes of my family wouldn't have been allowed up there it would have been too posh for us so there were lots of jokes about um west midland's life and poor nick still supports west bromish albion i know it's very you know you have to be resilient if you're a baggy supporter and and how would you describe how it works between you why why has it worked for 21 years What is the dynamic?

53:14Maria Balshaw:The dynamic is that we are quite different, despite having more commonalities than we had originally realised. Nick loves a plan, likes to stick to the plan. I like a plan, but very, very much like to break the plan or go on a detour. Okay. And we've learnt to appreciate the benefits of both of those things. and so we both got two children he has two boys Robert and Lucas and I have a boy and a girl Jake and Lily and they're very close in age and they got to know each other as friends first and how interesting and when I eventually plucked up courage to tell Jake and Lily that I thought I might have a new boyfriend and Jake the older one just something I want to talk to you about that's important.

54:10And he just looked at him and went, you've got a boyfriend, haven't you?

54:13Maria Balshaw:I was like, maybe? How bad would that be? And he said, and he doesn't remember saying this, but I remember it very vividly. He said, well, it might be very bad because let's face it, some of your friends are really weird. And I said, well, it's Nick. Oh, that's all right. I mean, he knows about Pokemon and stuff like that. And Robert and Luke are nice. so from the off the fact that we both had families and ex-partners, all of that actually made it really work between us and then we've worked in related parts of the museum world but never quite the same I mean Nick is really old stuff and I, although Tate Britain is older art, I mean we don't do we don't do prehistory nick's first job was as curator of prehistory and i have been always largely the contemporary and i think that opposition works okay i mean taking you back a bit how becoming a mum how did that change things for you and your relationship with the home actually um well i had jake quite young um for someone that was an academic and um so sort of of my kind of professional class or cohort.

55:35Maria Balshaw:I had my kids probably a decade before most of my other friends did. So in your 20s? Yeah. So I was 27 when I had Jake. And that was partly because my first husband was 10 years older than me and he already had a son called Nathan. So as soon as we started living together, there was anyway a young person. And also I was just very stupid in my 20s. Well, we already have a son. I might as well have another one. That won't be too difficult. With the foolishness of being kind of 25 at that stage. And then I had three miscarriages before I had Jake, which made me grow up very, very rapidly and just mature in a really unpleasant but powerful way of having to manage grief and a sense of my body not feeling like my own.

56:31Oh, really?

56:32Maria Balshaw:And then had Jake. So I've always really enjoyed being a mother and haven't found it to be at conflict with having a very, very busy work life always because I was a working academic then. And I think it's because I thought for a period that I wouldn't ever be able to have children. So I was just so grateful that Jake was alive. It never occurred to me to be anything other than, And thank God I'm his mother. Yeah. Finally. Yeah. And one other academic friend who's still my best friend, Helen, had children. And she says now, well, I started having children because you were having children. I mean, it was about joining in.

57:19Maria Balshaw:And Ryan and Lauren, her two children, are like extra children to me and the same for her. So they all grew up together. but we were in our late 20s, so we didn't stop being 20-year-olds. And it was attached to the home quite profoundly because the only way of actually having a social life was to do it at home. So we evolved a complex kind of dinner party life, not posh dinner parties, the very opposite, but we'd all go to one person's house, feed the children first and make them run around until they were so tired they could just be shoved in one room to go to sleep and then have our adult friends come and drink until we fell asleep because we couldn't afford babysitters and it was cheaper to cook for each other.

58:08Maria Balshaw:And so we raised children that were very comfortable kind of sleeping in anybody's house and kids that were good at being looked after by lots of adults. Okay. which again I realise is very much like a recreation of my experience of extended family okay how do you reflect on that because nowadays of course we're all having children much later I mean in my case I was a mid-30s up to early 40s what do you think about that is it the sort of you know blissful ignorance of youth somehow or what was the upside what was the downside um i mean the downside was that um i didn't i mean i didn't go to nearly as many music festivals as any of my childhood and we were really skint um because child care was so heinously when i because then i had lily quite soon after jake completely by accident and i think i thought i hadn't started my periods properly what's the age gap between them they're 18 months between but so child care for two of them my entire salary just used to go on child care and so those were the downsides and and and also really kind of not knowing what i was doing at all and none of us do but no but that's the upside because when you don't know what you're doing in your late 30s or early 40s and i see this with cousins who are younger than me and as well as friends and colleagues at work you really worry about it because you feel yourself to be a competent individual when you're 40 and when you're 26 you're not sure you're competent anyway so if you're incompetent at motherhood then i i didn't hold it against myself so much um and neither did helen and so we were messier and i think that was the real upside and also we were just and we were energetic because we were young it didn't bother me so much not having a load of sleep and I hadn't got highly evolved standards or ways of living that were then disrupted by a child.

1:00:14I was still forming myself and I think that was an advantage

1:00:19Maria Balshaw:and it made my latter career much easier. Yes. Because when I got the job at Tate, I could move from Manchester to London because Lily was about to go to FE college and then art school and Jake had already gone to university. And they give me advice these days about all the things that affect the museum world rather than me having to think, oh, who's feeding the children tonight? So how old are they now? They are 28 and 26. Okay, and how often do they come here then? All holidays, most holidays, all holidays. and regular long weekends. And we chose the house as well because there are five bedrooms.

1:01:11Maria Balshaw:So all four of them have got a room. And that room gets used by our friends when they stay and other guests. But they do each have a room. That's really nice, actually, isn't it? And that felt really important. That's really, really nice. Yeah, I've met quite a few people who've really sort of lamented the loss of the family home in their 20s onwards, because it is still a real, it's an important grounding place, I think, isn't it? Yeah, yeah. And they're all clear that, I mean, this wasn't the house they grew up in and it isn't in the part of the country that they call their own. But, I mean, they revert to their dynamic of four and, you know, we have to fill the cupboard full of crisps.

1:01:59Maria Balshaw:rather than the um and they'll eat the healthier food as well but there's they descend and there they are they are themselves and and and they all they all in for different reasons really love it here and we had a dog when they were growing up when nick and i got properly together and got married again we decided we would have a dog rather than having another child and it was because by then the children were through them the messy bit of child i really can't go back I can't go back to that. No, no. Absolutely not. But so many people do. I mean, it blows my mind. Yeah, it's madness. No, I prefer older children anyway.

1:02:36Maria Balshaw:I mean, as difficult as teenagers are, and I love teenagers. I just think they're so interesting. So we didn't want a baby, but we did want something that was our family, and so we got a dog, and that was great. And she lived wonderful 16 years. but when she passed just not long after my mum she was there when mum died we decided we wouldn't have another for a while because we were both Nick and I at real peak work at that stage and then Nick stepped down last summer and immediately started planning to get a dog and as one of my other museum director friends said texting with I can't believe your news he said I think Frida has had a paw in this very good because as nick started to plan to get frida our irish terrier more and more became clear to me that he was going to have a freedom that i actually felt quite envious about okay how interesting frida's so gorgeous she's coming home with me yeah and um not all of the adults in our lives were coming this christmas until frida arrived and then everyone came really stayed for the whole of Christmas because why wouldn't you when there's a super cute Irish terrier puppy?

1:03:56How do you feel like a pet like that changes the home? Because I mean I've got a young whippet myself at home and in my case because they're quite fragile whippets what she shows me is how to be comfortable so she finds all the shafts of sunlight and she lies in them and she rotates around the house during the day sort of following the sun but how do you find it? Well,

1:04:23Maria Balshaw:Frida does that, there's underfloor heating here and she has identified which are the warmest tiles to lie on. There you go, you see. And I have, I mean, I would be over-tidy left to myself. And I know that for others, and especially for Nick, that that can feel really oppressive. And I think a dog is a good balancer for me because however much I have already trained her to have her paws wiped when she comes in, she will escape and create mess and has decided that under the dining table is her place to shred cardboard. I'm giving her that. It's got to be done somewhere. Yeah, absolutely. So she keeps my kind of OCD tidiness in a good proportion.

1:05:13So how do you explain your tidiness?

1:05:16Maria Balshaw:I think it's um or I can do all the busyness and I'd like I mean and I'm good at travel and um and I can settle myself anywhere because I'm always ordering things and so orderliness is just is about calm for me is it so is your work also about that orderliness no I think I mean work artists do disorderly things very often but but you supply the order to the disorder we provide the frame in the framework but the organization i mean taint needs always to look like it's calm and in control it's a boiling mass of contradictions and emotions and neuroses and all of that so um um yeah the tidiness is my apparent my apparent calm yeah yeah it's interesting isn't it um so you you talked about the tape there just in terms of living with art you told me earlier that you you're not allowed to live with the artists who you represent through the tape so just tell us about that yeah and i'm not even sure whether it's true in other countries but in this country if you are the director of a public museum, so where the collections are held kind of in perpetuity for the benefit of the public, it seemed quite properly to be a conflict of interest if you then were buying yourself those same artists.

1:06:43Maria Balshaw:And that's partly because, you know, I could choose to buy something that might be better than something that would go into the collection at Tate or the Whitworth. But it's also that I could steal a kind of market advantage. Yeah, yeah. Young artist, I know she or he is going to have a show at Tate, I buy before they do. Very messy. So from my first job at the Whitworth, there's just a generally held principle that you shouldn't collect the things that you show and care for. And anyway, I have a civil service kind of salary, which in no way, shape or form, would be sufficient to buy the kind of remarkable artists that we show at Tate.

1:07:29Maria Balshaw:So I'm let off the hook. I don't have an art collection. Yeah. I have quite a lot, though, on the walls that are the traces of the artists that I've worked with and the projects that I've been involved with, especially when I've been sort of generative to them. So sometimes documentary of the making of a piece of performance art. So there's a photograph of Marina Abramovich screaming in a good way. And there are prints and drawings and things that are associated with artists that have become friends. But there's nothing really grand here. It's the history of a life with art rather than the art itself.

1:08:10Maria Balshaw:And then that gave me room to have really wonderful textiles that I've, I learned a lot about textiles when I was at the Whitworth and have subsequently travelled so variously. that on the wall in the dining room, there's a really, really extraordinary Nigerian textile, just a beautiful woven length. And I find things like that. It's interesting that. Yeah, so my business partner, Albert Hill, who I started The Modern House with, he now does art consultancy and he's really into textile art. to the uninitiated what why is it an interesting thing to live with because it's quite different isn't it from a painting for me with um textiles and artists who work with textiles it's very often about um history um so i mean i i own a piece of um japanese denim um it's like a working jacket It's from 1838.

1:09:18Maria Balshaw:And I bought it for not very much money at all last year. And every time I'm wearing it, I think, this is so old. And it's had so many lives before me. So textiles carry intimate histories with them and often whole histories of nations. So the Garnet and Kente cloth that's upstairs or that piece of weaving or the curtains in the dining room are made by the single remaining company in Lagos that makes traditional wax resist. Now most of it sadly is made in China and imported. I mean, and that tradition came from Javanese culture and the dyeing has gone back and forth between the UK and the African continent and you can trace bad as well as good histories through the movement of cloth, which is about trading routes.

1:10:17So it's all of that. They're freighted with meaning and technique and history,

1:10:27Maria Balshaw:whereas a painted canvas has come from the inspiration of one single artist. I mean, always within a tradition and so on, But for me, it's the interconnected, usually global histories that I find so interesting. Really interesting. If someone's listening or watching and is thinking about living with art in some way and doesn't really know where to start, what would be your advice, do you reckon? To not be intimidated. So you just haven't done that, isn't it? It is, but to listen to a gut feeling rather than a brain feeling. Right. It doesn't matter how much it's worth in the market terms because anyway, that may change over time.

1:11:20Maria Balshaw:It's about how a piece of work connects to you and that's, to me, what makes the difference. Yeah. And then much more practically, prints are a fantastic place to start and printmaking is so interesting as a whole practice. Tracey Emin, known as creator of my bed, amazing painter, is a really extraordinary printmaker. She uses it as a form of drawing and she draws every day. And so prints and drawings, much easier price point. for people to start and you can learn lots because you can see lots of them and you've worked a lot with children in your career as well and try and connect them to art have you got any thoughts around the home and how we bring out their creativity and love of art in the home and good quality materials yeah so we did an amazing project with Oscar Murillo um in the Turbine Hall through all of the summer holidays.

1:12:29Maria Balshaw:And he got people to create really large scale canvases. He wasn't present there. He created an environment where they could express themselves in a way that would be aesthetically very pleasing and resolved. And what that looked like was very large-scale canvas, workstations with artist-quality acrylic paints. And the canvases stretched so that they were right down to the floor so babies could put their hand in and wipe things and toddlers could do it. And the parents, of course, get really involved and set the palette. And it changed over time. And each time a canvas was full of paint, it would be moved and displayed elsewhere in the turbine hall.

1:13:19Maria Balshaw:but he just said it's got to be as good as the artist um would use in the studio and the learning team worked really carefully to have these sort of mobile units so you could move stuff around so that people could take it seriously and if we were sitting at this kitchen counter it's um oil pastels and really good crayons and really really good pencils and an excellent pencil sharpener and nice paper and it doesn't matter if the paper gets torn or but i i am obsessed with paper i mean some of my favorite drawings and prints are not because of what's on them but because the paper they're on really um and you could give children the pleasure in that tactility and the fact that they can make a mark which is all the learning to express yourself is just about mark making they'll make a better mark if they've got a good good pencil yeah i remember some friends of mine when when their children were younger they used to have a roll of paper in the corner of the room where they had lunch together and they'd roll it out across the table before meals and then just give the kids stuff to make a mess with it was really quite powerful actually mess is very important yeah it's been so interesting murray i've got one more question which i always ask um how would you sum up the importance of your home in your life and the role that it plays this is the house that i hope i die in um and i don't say that in any morbid sense at all losing my father and then my mother was you know the most distressing and um not wished for experience um and this house gave a container for all of those that experience and those emotions and it also gave my mother a way of going gently into the next world and so it really deepened a sense that I already had that the home isn't about the furnishings or the rooms.

1:15:33Maria Balshaw:It's about the people that inhabit it and the love that is exchanged and made and fought over and found. So home is very, very significant for me. And I hope I've got many decades more to just see that richness that is about me and the chosen families that gather here and for all that to deepen. So lovely. Thank you so much. It's been such an interesting morning. I've really appreciated it. Thank you, Maria. You're very welcome. It is a pleasure talking with you. Thank you.

1:16:30Min Hoon