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- [00:01]
A
This is the house that I hope I die in. And I don't say that in any morbid sense at all. Losing my father and then my mother was the most distressing and not wished for experience. And this house gave a container for all of that experience and those emotions. And it also gave my mother a way of going gently. I wanted to be different. I couldn't describe what it was. I wanted to be. I wanted to be different from the norm. 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.
- [00:57]
B
Hi, Maria.
- [00:58]
A
Hello.
- [00:59]
B
Thank you so much for being on Homing. We all start back at the beginning. So tell me about your childhood home. Where did you grow up?
- [01:07]
A
The house I spent most of my childhood in was in Northampton. We moved there when I was five. So I remember other houses, one in Leicester and my grandmother's house. But this was a new house, a new development on the edge of Northampton. And my dad had moved there for his job. He was. He worked in parks and so he did parks and development and he was part of the kind of thinking about laying out the landscapes for the new town. And as part of that, this new estate was built and so nobody had lived in it before. I still. I remember coming there and there being just sort of concrete tiles on the floor, no furniture at all. It was a Barrett home, even though probably wasn't built by Barrett. You know, like a square box, four small bedrooms, lounge, kitchen, dining room. And my parents lived there for the rest of their life.
- [02:04]
B
Oh, really?
- [02:05]
A
And I was there from 5 till I was 18.
- [02:07]
B
Okay, so what are your memories of it? I mean, you've come to a house now which we'll get into later, which is very different from a Barrett style home. So that's already quite interesting. But what are your memories of living in that way when you were young?
- [02:21]
A
It was a very practical house. And very quickly my dad made sure that the walls were insulated and the windows were double glazed. So it was warm and very airtight. And it had almost no distinguishing design features or aspirations to have any.
- [02:45]
B
There's an honesty to that, isn't there?
- [02:47]
A
Absolutely. And so I very happily grew up there with my brother. I. And. But I never liked the house. I kind of, even as a quite young child, knew it to be characterless.
- [03:00]
B
Did you?
- [03:01]
A
Yes, definitely.
- [03:03]
B
So that's really interesting, isn't it? How would you have articulated that when you were young and what did you do to try and overcome that somehow in a wider.
- [03:12]
A
My mum was one of six children who mostly lived in the West Midlands, across the. So Dudley, Wednesbury, Birmingham, the black country. And they lived in old houses in Victorian terraces, all houses even older than that. And I could see they had higgledy piggledy houses. My grandmother had a funny staircase that you had to kind of turn back on itself to get up to her bedroom. And our house was really symmetrical and really functional, so I recognized that, but I didn't love it. And I was much more into the more chaotic sort of renegade kind of homes that the extended family lived in. And when I was in my mid teens, mum and dad went on holiday and I was given permission to paint my own bedroom. And I don't. I think my mom was very, very regretful of that decision.
- [04:16]
B
Go on, tell us.
- [04:18]
A
I. I painted the walls really bright yellow, rather like the front room here, the woodwork in a really kind of inky blue. Again, it was basically this kitchen, isn't it? And. But garish gloss paint because, you know, it's the early 80s. And of course we started off, me and my friend doing this painting very well. And by day two, we were quite bored of it and we're doing it in a very slap dash fashion, so quite shiny yellow walls and really inky blue paintwork and quilts from Habitat to full of different kind of clashing colors. And I changed the curtains as well, and I had my Starsky and Hutch poster and I think. And the rest of my mum's house was sort of muted taupe and cream and elegant. And she was really good with textiles, so she had nice curtains and things like this. I think she said, oh, holy shit, what's she done? And about 20 years later, they finally got round to redecorating, she said. We said we just could not get that blue paint off. So we decided we'd replace the skirting boards in the end.
- [05:34]
B
What did they used to say about you then? Oh, she's creative, I'll bet, because.
- [05:37]
A
Yeah, she creative or she's always had flair.
- [05:43]
B
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Flair's a good one.
- [05:45]
A
Unusual. That's very unusual, dear. Oh, you hate it, don't you? Great, thanks.
- [05:51]
B
That's so interesting. So how would you describe why you were that person then that wanted to do that to your bedroom and you wouldn't just accept it, how it was somehow.
- [06:01]
A
Well, from an early age, I was a very avid reader and I'm very much encouraged by My mother especially and her sisters and my grandmother, so always books around. And my mum's younger sister, Sylvia, was worked in Community Arts and was a really overt feminist. Bought me lots of feminist sci fi novels, many of which I still keep now. And so I was encouraged to sort of pursue vivid imagination. Northampton in the 1980s was not full of vivid imagination. There weren't. There was no art gallery, there was a little museum, but it was very traditional. The only band that I can think of were the Bauhaus, who, I mean, were unusual, but not my music taste. And the other thing our family really encouraged was music. So my mum and dad always had records, but wider family people played and there was a lot of Irish folk music and sylv. My aunt and her first husband would make me tapes and send me David Bowie and Bow Wow Wow and Joy Division and the Smiths. And Phil, her husband then, particularly encouraged this sense of we've got to save you from suburbia. So he would send me tapes and they'd often have a note saying, listen to this often, it will preserve your spirit. And it might be a Bowie compilation album or, I don't know, the Buzzcocks or something like that. And so the music press and reading and science fiction and lots of other worlds were really important to me. And I particularly remember the impact of Face magazine, which was kind of. It was in WH Smith, but it's sort of on the top shelf, as if it was porn. And. But if you could get one, if I had enough pocket money to buy one, that was like this other world. And I remember seeing photographs of Leigh Bowery, who we did a show at Tate Modern with recently or about him recently and these people. So Bowie either is a lad in sane mode or young Americans, or when he did fashion, which was like my mid teens, those are the people that I want to meet. That's the world that I want to pursue. And I have a particularly vivid memory of Neil Tennant, who used to write for Smash Hits from the Pet Shop Boys.
- [08:47]
B
Yeah.
- [08:48]
A
Leaving the magazine and he wrote a letter to the readers. And so I might have been about 13. So, dear readers, so I love you all, but I'm going away to make my fortune to be in a pop band and to make a number one record. And if I come crawling back in six months time, please forgive me. But of course, in six months time, West End Girls was on Top of the Pops. And I was very sad that he left the magazine because I loved his writing but delighted with the Pet Shop Boys music And it was that sort of dream that you could run away to London and there would be a life of fashion and music and sort of sci fi excitement.
- [09:33]
B
It's really hard to think now, isn't it, because media is such a sort of fragmented world. But magazines like the Face were so influential, weren't they? It just got all that stuff into your bedroom directly. It's like a main line in, wasn't it?
- [09:45]
A
Absolutely. It was like having your own kind of art show because the photography was so, so extraordinary. And I wanted to be different. I couldn't describe what it was I wanted to be, but I wanted to be different from the norm. And the norm was the, you know, the shopping center near our house or school. I just, I wanted. I liked school and I worked hard at school, but I also, I wanted to rebel.
- [10:14]
B
So you wanted to rebel and you wanted to be saved from suburbia, which is such a great phrase. Can you put your finger on why that is? Were you born like that or was something lit somewhere along the line?
- [10:27]
A
No, I think I was born like that.
- [10:29]
B
Do you?
- [10:29]
A
I think I always had an overactive imagination. I recognized the same in my daughter.
- [10:34]
B
Okay.
- [10:35]
A
And from the earliest years she didn't want to do the things that she was supposed to do. And so I think I was born like that. But also I think the wider family, Irish Catholic, kind of mayhem, really definitely found that a lot. I mean, my aunt Sylv, so she worked in community arts and. And meaning she ran a community arts organization that had a building but would do projects in Poland. She wants. They had a bus, a double decker bus for quite a long time and they used to drive it around and set up arts projects. And she drove it to Northampton and it was part of the local show. She was about 5 foot tall. I mean, you could barely see her behind the steering wheel of this bus. So there were. And my mum's older sister Kath had fled her first marriage to run away to folk festivals and the Upton Jazz Festival, lots of camping and things like that. So there was a fair bit of imagination around me.
- [11:41]
B
Okay. And so you talk briefly about your dad. What about your mum then? Tell us about her character and what she was good at doing when you were young.
- [11:50]
A
Well, mum was a primary school teacher, she did the reception. So the youngest children, and she was the middle child of this family of six, it's three girls and three boys. And they had come from, they were Catholic, that had come from Northern Ireland to the West Midlands. And it was quite a chaotic set of households. And quite a chaotic upbringing. And she's the super sensible middle child and she was the baker and she could sew and she would make curtains and all of those things that you get when you're the one in the middle who is watching all the others kind of bounce off the walls. But of course, like most of those sensible ones, she wasn't really that sensible. And so she loved to sing and she and dad were good jivers and rock and roll dancers. So she was a very, very steady mother. And her teaching turned into gymnastic coaching. And I did gymnastics from when I was a little girl all the way through my teens and was in the national squad. And so I did a lot of training and very, very disciplined things in my teenage years, which, of course, I think that was the other reason I was rebelling. I had this sort of sports life where you had to really, really practise and I'd get up early and train before school and we'd spent our weekends doing training and you were in a uniform. So the rebellion was the flip side of that. And Mum was part of that whole gymnastics world and my dad was the main cook. So we'd come back from gymnastics on a Saturday and my dad would be making a stew or boeuf bourguignon. He liked to cook really well in the kitchen and my brother would be kind of watching a football results. And so it was a conventional, but not very conventional family.
- [14:06]
B
So gymnastics is all about movement, obviously. I don't know if this is a typical day for you, but today you're doing this recording with us and then you're going to London because you're installing the Tracey Emin show. And you said earlier, every day is pretty full on, so you've clearly got a lot of energy. Is that. Is that fair to say?
- [14:28]
A
Yeah.
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B
Are you someone? Is it almost. Is it a life in movement somehow? And how. How do you balance that out, out of interest?
- [14:37]
A
Yeah. My mum said once that she took me to gymnastics because when I was age 4 or 5, because I couldn't sit still. And so I think I've always had a great deal of physical energy and a lot of mental alertness as well. And since I like doing lots of things, I. Not multitasking, but having five or six different things running simultaneously and moving from different realms of my life. And then as I've got older, and especially as I've kind of gone into my 50s and gone through menopause, the sense of needing to be rooted and still is sort of expressed through my garden And I was remembering just recently that I got an allotment. My dad had an allotment when we were kids, but I got an allotment just after I'd had my second child. Really very suboptimal time to start an allotment. It was one baby in a sling and a toddler running around. And my son Jake incurred various. One quite serious injury by falling on spades and into ditches and things at the allotment. But it was that sense I wanted to have something that was long, long time span.
- [15:58]
B
Yeah.
- [16:00]
A
And that was, for me, that would be kind of quiet and quietly growing when I wasn't there, just sort of doing its thing and making steady progress. And so that's always been the counterbalance for me. And I also. I do yoga and I swim all year round. And those things are about a different kind of activity. Not frenetic, but very steady.
- [16:28]
B
Okay, let's talk about art. Can you remember a particular encounter with fine art that ignited that interest in you?
- [16:36]
A
Yes. I bought a copy of Jean Paul Sartre's the Age of Reason, a Penguin edition, and it had Picasso's Weeping Woman on the COVID And I bought it because of the COVID And it's a very hard book to read, and I'm not sure that the translation is that great either. And so I don't think I ever got to the end of it. But I carried this book around quite a lot because I wanted to be identified with the look of it, the
- [17:08]
B
look of the COVID Yes. Oh, wow.
- [17:09]
A
And fascinating. Definitely being modern and being unusual because, you know, it's clearly a woman, but it doesn't look like a woman. So I was very intrigued by this painting and. And I think I saw it in that context. And I. And I really loved saying earlier the. The looks that I saw in things like face, because there wasn't a lot of that around me. There weren't contemporary art galleries or spaces in my teenage environment. So I started to actively seek that out. And rather brilliantly, Weeping Woman is in Tate's collection. So I went to London when I was allowed. So I can't remember, though I was 15 or 16. And after quite a lot of persuasion, Mum agreed I could go on my own to the train, on the train down to London. And I went to look for art and I went to the National Portrait Gallery first. I don't even. I think, because it was in Trafalgar Square. And then I went to the National Gallery and neither of them were what I was looking for. It's like, no, this is old. I want contemporary things.
- [18:22]
B
I have a vision of you breezing through the galleries at high speed here.
- [18:27]
A
No, that wouldn't be right. Actually, I was really intimidated.
- [18:30]
B
Were you?
- [18:31]
A
Very much so. I mean, so our family encouraged reading and there was a lot of community based activity, you know, the. The grandness of the National Gallery. I wasn't sure whether I'd have to pay or not pay or whether I'd be allowed in. And I didn't have any context for understanding the old master paintings that were there. And it really. I almost went back on the train to Northampton, but then I looked at my A to Z again and found the tube station. Realized I could get that there was this other place called Tate and so I went to Pimble and there was only one Tate then, and I went. Then again, I was intimidated going in there. You still have to go up those stone steps and the Grand Portico. But when I got there, because it was still in the days when all of Tate's collection was in one place, I saw Bridget Riley and I found the Picasso. But actually. And I was really pleased to see the painting, the Picasso painting in the flesh. It's up in Tate Modern at the moment and it is a remarkable painting. But that was like a reward because I'd been looking at it as my book cover for ages. But to encounter Riley's work just blew my mind.
- [19:58]
B
Why did it?
- [19:59]
A
Because it looked like it was moving. And, you know, you can't see the kind of optical complexity of Bridget's work in reproduction. So even if I don't know whether I had seen one, but Tate's got some really beautiful examples of her work. And I just thought I didn't. Again, I had no language for understanding what abstract art was even doing, really. But I just thought it was amazing how interesting.
- [20:27]
B
Your career is such an esteemed one that I think we could do several podcasts on that. And I think what. What I think I'd like to ask you, I suppose, in the spirit of the home, as the theme of the podcast, you know, you were director of the Whitworth and you've obviously been first female director of Tate since 2017. How do you feel at home as a sort of corporate leader of quite a big organization like that, especially when you start out, because there must be a real imposter syndrome about it.
- [20:58]
A
Yeah, I think most leaders of organizations like Tate feel that sort of, you know, who gave me the qualifications to do that. And I think I had that feeling much more strongly than many of my Male peers.
- [21:20]
B
Do you?
- [21:21]
A
Yes. And it isn't only to do with gender. And I was from. I had kind of proven myself as a museum director in the north of England, so there was a moving south thing. How's she gonna cope with London? It's not so very different to Manchester. And, you know, we also work in tape works in New York and Beijing and, you know, we have to be ready to be wherever in the world. And there's also a class thing. And I. You know, I didn't grow up with museums. The familial hinterland was full of incredibly inspiring people, but they weren't cultural leaders or members of the House of Lords or anything like that. So there were lots of things that were different for me coming into that role, which is what's made it so amazing. But. And because I think having imposter syndrome is quite good. Really.
- [22:24]
B
Do you? Why? Why do you say that?
- [22:27]
A
Well, because the. The institution isn't only about any individual. It isn't about its leader or any single person that works there. It has its own impetus and its own history and its own collection and its own buildings. So you're only a steward or a custodian anyway. But more fundamentally than that, institutions like Tate or the Whitworth are for the public. So I've always felt it was really quite good that I could remember what it was like to come into museums when I was a bit scared of them.
- [23:06]
B
Yeah, definitely.
- [23:08]
A
And think of them through the eyes of a public that isn't familiar. So I've never been an insider, even though all the years I've accumulated, now I have to sort of give myself a slap and say, I am an insider, of course I am, but I have a healthier than most sense of who we're actually doing it for. And how should we think about art in the context of not just talking to ourselves, but talking to other people.
- [23:35]
B
I would love to talk about this house. Maria, thank you so much for showing me around earlier. It is amazing. So just assume that people haven't got any context yet, because most people will be coming at this the first time around. Tell me about this building briefly, because it's a bit of a melange of periods, isn't it?
- [23:57]
A
Yeah. The house is like a set of those nested dolls, except the dolls wouldn't really fit inside one another, because it's a house of several periods put together really, very incongruously so. It is, at its heart, a house from the 1300s. And the whole of the area around here was owned by St Thomas's Hospital in London, because those hospitals always had land in the countryside to grow food and to be able to take trees down to build houses. And so there were fantastic records of when the parts of this rather strange house were built. So originally it was the court lodge. It had an open fire and a solar, and we've still got that sort of medieval kind of part of the house. And in fact it survived until the late 1940s with the solar upstairs and was only taken out when it was kind of the farmhouse bit was expanded as part of that sort of dig for England, grow vegetables and barley and wheat after the Second World War. But it's changed enormously in its lifetime. So it was extended in the early Georgian period, but they didn't bother knocking down any of the previous. They just wrapped a much bigger Georgian house around the original one. And so in our attic when we bought the house, you could see this previous roof, all of the rafters, smoke blackened kind of inside and on a different orientation to the larger Georgian house. And so on one side, south facing, thankfully, and facing our garden and the church, there is this very proper Georgian facade. And then in the late 40s, when they expanded the farm business, they built this kitchen, not like this, and another little extension that were absolutely sort of blocky, Little sort of 40s 50s spaces with crittle windows. And they replaced some of the old windows with a rather amazing long critter window. This long kitchen was four little boxes, so tiny kitchen, tiny washroom, and then two rooms for farmhands to sleep in. And it was horrible. But the crow windows were good. And so when we came to see it, to buy it, or not even knowing to buy it, we came because Hastingley is a few miles from Wye, which had, until the 90s, I think, England's only horticulture university was part of the University of London, but it was a practical course and my dad did the degree there, and so my mum and dad did their early courting in the village of Wye. And so we'd never lived in this part of the world, but I knew about it from family stories. And so we decided we'd come and see things here, because moving from the north down to London, we couldn't afford a house in London that would be big enough for our four adult children to visit. So we had this plan. We'd live in the countryside, we'd have a tiny sort of studio flat in London, and we came to see this, and I have to say it was very unpalatable. Or unprepossessing when we first saw it because it had become very overgrown. The couple who lived here had had rich and very interesting lives here, but it had got too big for them as they got older. And we couldn't even find the front door when we came to view it because there was an enormous rose and several kind of rogue trees grown in front of the house so you couldn't see where to get in.
- [28:08]
B
But was that part of the appeal though? Because there is something about rescuing a building, isn't there?
- [28:12]
A
Yeah, it certainly was for me. I would say my husband Nick was less enthusiastic about that. But I really love, I love rescuing houses. Yeah, I think again, it's the reaction against that. Growing up in a house that was literally new, had sort of just been finished. So the first house I bought with my first husband was a completely knackered three story Victorian house in Balsa Heath in Birmingham. And I mean we had no central heating and no proper toilet. It was really, really rotten. But it was really cheap and we just gradually did it up. And when we bought our house on Butte, it was a, again six bedrooms looking down onto the sea, but it was nearly falling down. And again it was a project, it was a holiday project as well as a holiday home for us and the kids because we wanted the space and to be near the water. But it was again, nobody else would have bought it. And by then even my, my son Jake said, well, that's the thing about you, mom. You're not scared, are you? Of things that are ramshackle, Falling down, broken.
- [29:34]
B
A quick interlude to let you know that you can watch my house tour with Maria on Patreon. She shows me the many faces of her incredible home in Kentucky, from its medieval origins to its Derek Jarman inspired front garden and its beautiful Georgian rear facade. I've never been anywhere quite like it. So head over to patreon.com homingwithmat to take a look. I mean, it's really interesting to me this because I don't, you know, the diametric opposite of the house you grew up in would be a 14th century house with Georgian and, you know, 1940s additions. And it is so layered. It is very onion like it is very. Like a Russian doll as you say. So I find that really fascinating, that sort of reaction that you've had to it.
- [30:21]
A
Yeah. When we started looking for houses, as well as sort of being interested in places that were sort of in this bit of Kent, the list of what we wanted was, was the, the opposite of what we Ended up with, I was hoping that it would be on the seaside because I really love sea swimming. And I was hoping that it would be a modern house because I was a bit bored of doing up knackered old houses. And I love modernist architecture and I love clean lines and all of that. So that clearly sort of comes from early life. So we didn't get any of those things. But there was just the one non negotiable was that it had to have a proper garden, real space for me to be able to garden in, because as soon as I had houses, I made gardens, but I've always had quite small urban gardens, so had to have allotments if I wanted to grow vegetables. And we came and visited here late September, which is when the wood that is part of the garden and the orchard that is also here looks just the most wonderful. And so the pear tree was growing with pears. There were 10 different varieties of apples in the garden. And we walked around and I could see Nick's shoulders sagging slightly. Oh, bloody hell. She's going to buy this one because I can see how much she loves the garden. And I, I just, I did and. And I left with a bag of pears because the Maureen who sold us the house said I was the only person that ever visited that had asked about the trees.
- [32:01]
B
Okay.
- [32:01]
A
And that that was right, because the orchard and we've added more trees now and all of that. It's. Everything grows so well here. So I was quite happy to bin all the other requirements. And Nick was happy about it being old because he's an archaeologist. So he was only on sufferance going down this route of we should have a modern house.
- [32:23]
B
Okay.
- [32:25]
A
So I got my garden and he got his old house. And then the bit that was ugliest, the critter window, 40s extension, is the loveliest part of the house now, which is this part.
- [32:36]
B
Yeah, we were in the kitchen. Yeah.
- [32:37]
A
Everybody wins.
- [32:39]
B
Everybody. I love the idea that you go home with pears so you can sort of take some of the house home with you and dwell on it somehow. It's actually quite powerful that on the subject of the garden then what I love is that they've hugely different character at the front and at the back. So tell us about that.
- [32:58]
A
Yeah. Well, again, I think a lot of the things that we've done here have been a mix of practicality and sort of force of circumstance and sort of grand romantic gestures. So the front garden is all gravel on a concrete farmyard underneath. And it's because we hadn't got any more money and it looked absolutely horrible. And Derek Jarman is one of my great inspirations. And Dungeness isn't far away and so I realised I could make a gravel garden, but I mean, we couldn't afford to even have the concrete smashed up, so we broke up a few bits so I could put some plants in and then just laid such a lot of grit and gravel that plants could thrive. And so it is a Dungeness at the front. And then the side garden is a deeply romantic rose garden inspired by Sissinghurst. And the back is really very great Dixter. There's a mixture of formal garden and meadows and orchards and wood. And Sissinghurst and Dixter are the two great. I think they're two of the greatest UK gardens, but they're the great Kent gardens.
- [34:15]
B
Yeah, for sure. So you're obviously a big gardener. What other routines do you have through a classic day or a weekend?
- [34:25]
A
It's swimming and gardening and walking.
- [34:28]
B
Yeah.
- [34:30]
A
So sea swimming in Folkestone. So get up, don't have any breakfast, go and swim and then get coffee at the seaside.
- [34:38]
B
Oh, really?
- [34:38]
A
Yeah.
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B
Why? Out of interest, why? Like, first thing that you do as you wake up.
- [34:45]
A
First, I mean, first, first thing. Always tea in bed. Like property with tea leaves.
- [34:49]
B
Okay.
- [34:50]
A
So rituals, food rituals, drinking rituals, really important to me. But no first thing, because if you start. Well, if the thing about gardening is if you go out for one minute, you come back three hours later and then you won't get round to going for a swim. So go out first and then come back. And the garden is two acres and I grow vegetables all year round and I shouldn't be able to do either of those things and have a full time job, never mind one that is as demanding and has as much travel as the Tate job does. So I cram it all in around the edges. And again, my poor husband Nick often feels like the farmhand that he gets. Go and dig over there. Move this compost, please. And he's become really, really good at that because he wasn't really a gardener before he met me. But I need to get my hands dirty and need to swim because that sort of slows off all of the stress of an urban working week.
- [35:59]
B
Okay. The physical washing process, yeah, that's really
- [36:03]
A
interesting, but I think hands in the dirt and I'm often embarrassed in the middle of a working week. I've still got dirt under my fingernails and I think. But it's clean dirt, you know, that's the good Thing about. Because I start with tools, and like many obviously say it's have my Japanese hori hori knife. But I nearly always start with a tool and then end up with my hands.
- [36:33]
B
Okay. When I met Dan Pearson, I was really struck by this idea that I think at a certain stage of life, you want to connect to the elements somehow. I feel that's a strong, urgent, you know, for him, it's very clear. You know, he has his kitchen garden and he. He brings the vegetables to his outdoor kitchen, and he prepares me, eats outside in the air. Yeah, he's created a place actually to swim down in the valley. Got all the elements going on. Do you identify with that?
- [37:02]
A
Very much so. And, I mean, he's a gardener who I follow and learn lots from. So I have a sink, an extra sink down the end of the kitchen. And when I was designing the kitchen, Nick's question was, why do we need that? Why do we need another sink? So, well, that sinks for the vegetables. So it's right by the back door, and the vegetables come in with all their soil, and there's a compost bin inside that so that monkey leaves go straight in there or the bits of the root. And being able to eat from the garden all year round and being able to fill vases throughout the house all year is 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 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. It's not as evolved as that amazing outdoor kitchen that Dan has, but we live outside. 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 1st of April right through to mid September when she passed away, sitting out on the terrace, taking the sunshine, 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. And I think that's the counterbalance to a job and a life that is very indoors and, you know, you keep light out of museums and it's very urban and I need that balance.
- [39:37]
B
You talked about your mum there. So she came to live with you for the last part of her life. What was that? 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?
- [39:52]
A
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, 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 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 know very much about what I really did. And I think there was. To go back to that childhood kind of word. I think she's quite unusual. And when Mum came and lived here, we were all living in this very unusual way of being kept at home, but having to keep our jobs going. And so tape was being run from my kitchen and my other senior colleagues kitchens or bedrooms or studies. And it was deeply weird, but it meant that my mother got to see and hear what my job was really like. Okay, so one of my favorite memories is that the chair of Tate at that point was Lionel Barbour, who was then editor of the ft. And he's a big man and very forceful individual. And we'd be on Zooms or a of bunch 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 her a cup of tea and she. That was Lionel, 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. And she came to and sort of understand so much more deeply 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 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. But remember all the other parts of your life. And I talked about walking earlier. 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 Mum was living with us, left her for a day and when we came back she said that's. She said that's it, she'd remember. You and Nick need time to walk the Camino Way 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.
- [43:26]
B
What do you think of that?
- [43:28]
A
Well, that's why I'm stepping down from taint 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 organization like Tate, so you can have holidays but you know, the organization's always still running. And it's time now that I have a bit more time for all the other things 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.
- [44:48]
B
That's brilliant. Good for you. My father died of cancer around a similar sort of time as your, 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?
- [45:07]
A
I mean, I think it teaches you a huge amount. Partly because we're so. We're not very often 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 mum would have to live, as you don't with that kind of cancer. And everybody wasn't able to travel easily. 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. And they said, how many months will we do that? I said, well, we don't know, so we'll just do it. 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 panicking 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, Mum. And they knew they were coming and 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. And so the presence of family, but also chosen family, so various friends that knew my mum came and did the same. And as we moved into July and August, we were all able to move around a bit more. And the commitment to just time with people, that was what I really took from it and in a structured but unstructured way. And, and what did, what did you take from it?
- [47:45]
B
I'd say something very similar, which is 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, he was a fantastic architect and 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 fundamentals of somehow the rhythms of the natural world, I think, and I love the vision of your mum being outside with the sun on her face, looking at the garden, watching the birds. I think it's those rhythms we're all in. In rhythm with the natural world somehow. And I think it's about accepting our place in that much wider ecosystem.
- [48:40]
A
Yeah. And certainly this landscape gave me what I needed in that period. And as I said, Mum was with us because dad, who had been. She'd cared for him after a series of strokes for a decade. 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. 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 have 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 her was going to be her, 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. And I said, no, no, I see them too sometimes. And sometimes she clearly was making them up. But they were. They were a necessary metaphor for the transition she was making.
- [50:53]
B
Yeah. So lovely. Can I ask you about Nick? How did you guys meet and how long have you been together?
- [51:01]
A
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 had come 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 program that was set up by Dame Vivian Duffield, who's funding the wonderful garden at Tate Britain. She set up this program called the CLAW Leadership Program 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. But 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 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. But we're both from the West Midlands and as we got to know each other as friends, we had another friend of social. You two seem to have private jokes. What is that about? And his family lived in Sutton Coalfield and mine were over in Smethwick and Bearwood and Dudley, which is where his dad had originally come from. But he'd gone up in the world and of course Sutton Colefield calls itself the Royal Borough, and 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 West Midland's life. And poor Nick still supports West Bromwich Albion born Baggies. I know it's very, you know, you have to be resilient if you're a Baki supporter.
- [53:08]
B
And how would you describe how it works between you? Why has it worked for 21 years? What is the dynamic?
- [53:15]
A
The dynamic is that we are quite different, despite having more commonalities than we had originally realized. 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.
- [53:35]
B
Okay.
- [53:36]
A
And we've learned 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.
- [53:55]
B
Oh, interesting.
- [53:56]
A
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, said, I've something I want to talk to you about that's important. And he just looked at him and went, you've got a boyfriend, haven't you? 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. Well, it's Nick. Oh, that's all right. I mean, he knows about Pokemon and stuff like that. And Robert and Lucas 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 pre history. Nick's first job was as curator of pre history and I have been always largely the contemporary and I think that opposition works okay.
- [55:16]
B
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?
- [55:24]
A
Well, I had Jake quite young for someone that was an academic and so sort of off my kind of professional class or cohort. I had my kids probably a decade before most of my other friendships.
- [55:40]
B
So in your 20s?
- [55:41]
A
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.
- [56:31]
B
Oh really?
- [56:32]
A
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 thank God I'm his mother finally. And one other academic friend who's still my best friend, Helen had children and she says now, well, I started having children because were having children and I mean it was about joining in and Ryan and Lauren, her two children are like extra children to me and 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, of actually having a social life was to do it at home. So we evolved 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. 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. Which, again, I realized, is very much like a recreation of my experience of extended family.
- [58:27]
B
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 sort of 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 and what was the downside?
- [58:45]
A
I mean, the downside was that I didn't. I mean, I didn't go to nearly as many music festivals as any of my childish friends. And we were really skint because childcare was so heinously when I. Because then I had Lily quite soon after Jake, completely by accident, I think. I thought I hadn't started my periods properly.
- [59:08]
B
What's the age gap between them, then?
- [59:10]
A
They're 18 months between. Okay, but. So childcare for two of them. My entire salary just used to go on childcare. So those were the downsides. And also really kind of not knowing what I was doing at all.
- [59:26]
B
None of us do. But.
- [59:28]
A
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. When you're 26, you're not sure you're competent anyway. So if you're incompetent at motherhood, then I didn't hold it against myself so much, and neither did Helen. And so we were messier. And I think that was the real upside. And also we were just. 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. I was still forming myself, and I think that was an advantage. And it made my. My latter career much easier.
- [60:26]
B
Yes.
- [60:26]
A
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?
- [60:51]
B
So how old are they now?
- [60:53]
A
They are 28 and 26.
- [60:55]
B
Okay. And how often do they come here, then?
- [60:58]
A
All holiday. Most holidays. All holidays and regular long weekends. And we chose the house as well because there are five bedrooms, so all four of them have got a room. And that room gets used by our friends when they stay and the guests, but. But they do each have a room.
- [61:22]
B
That's really nice, actually.
- [61:22]
A
That felt really important.
- [61:24]
B
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?
- [61:38]
A
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. That they call their own. But, I mean, they revert to their dynamic of four and we have to fill the cupboard full of crisps rather than the. And they'll eat the healthier food as well. But they descend and they are themselves and they all, 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, because by then the children were through the messy bit of child. I really can't go back to the baby. Absolutely not. But so many people do. I mean, it blows my mind.
- [62:32]
B
It's madness.
- [62:34]
A
No, I prefer older children anyway. I mean, as difficult as teenagers are, 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. 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 Frieda has had a paw in this very good and she had, because as Nick started to plan to get Frieda, our Irish terrier, more and more became clear to me that he was gonna have a freedom that I actually felt quite envious about.
- [63:37]
B
Okay. How interesting. Frida's so gorgeous. She's coming home with me.
- [63:42]
A
Yep. And 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
- [63:56]
B
puppy, how 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, so following the sun. But how do you find it?
- [64:21]
A
Well, Frieda does that. There's underfloor heating here, and she has identified which are the warmest tiles to lie on.
- [64:30]
B
There you go. You see?
- [64:33]
A
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.
- [65:04]
B
It's got to be done somewhere.
- [65:05]
A
Absolutely. So she keeps my kind of over my kind of OCD tidiness in a good proportion.
- [65:14]
B
So how do you explain your tidiness?
- [65:17]
A
I think it's. Or I can do all the busyness and I'd like. I mean. And I'm good at travel and I can settle myself anywhere because I'm always ordering things. And so orderliness is just. Is about calm for me.
- [65:34]
B
So is your work also about that orderliness?
- [65:38]
A
No, I think. I mean, work. Artists do disorderly things very often.
- [65:45]
B
But do you supply the order to the disorder?
- [65:48]
A
We provide the frame and the framework, but the organization. I mean, Tate 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, yeah, the tidiness is my apparent calm.
- [66:07]
B
Yeah. Yeah. It's interesting, isn't it? So you talked about the Tate there, just in terms of living with art. You told me earlier that you're not allowed to live with the artists who you represent through the tape. So just tell us about that.
- [66:23]
A
Yeah. 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. 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. Young artist we know. I know she or he is going to have a show at Tate. I buy before they do. Very messy. Yeah. 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. So I'm let off the hook. I don't have an art collection. 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 Abravic 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. And then that gave me room to have really wonderful textiles, that I learned a lot about textiles when I was at the Whitworth and have subsequently traveled 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.
- [68:38]
B
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, why is it an interesting thing to live with? Because it's quite different, isn't it, from a painting?
- [68:59]
A
For me, with textiles and artists who work with textiles, it's very often about history. So, I mean, I own a piece of Japanese denim. It's like working jacket. It's from 1838, and I bought it for not very much money. At all last year. And I, every time I'm wearing 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 Ghanaian 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. And so it's all of that. They're freighted with meaning and technique and history. 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 that the interconnected, usually global histories that I find so interesting.
- [70:45]
B
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?
- [70:57]
A
To not be intimidated.
- [70:59]
B
It's easier said than done.
- [71:00]
A
That isn't is. But to listen to a gut feeling rather than a brain feeling. It doesn't matter how much it's worth in the market terms because anywhere that may change over time, it's about how a piece of work connects to you and that's to me what makes the difference. And then much more practically. Prints are a fantastic place to start and printmaking is so interesting as a whole practice. Most, you know, Tracey Emin, you know, 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.
- [72:05]
B
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?
- [72:17]
A
Good quality materials.
- [72:18]
B
Yeah.
- [72:20]
A
So we did an amazing project with Oscar Murillo in the Turbine hall through all of the summer holidays 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. 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. But he just said, it's got to be as good as the artist 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 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. But I am obsessed with paper. I mean, some of my favorite drawings and prints are not because of what's on them, but because of the paper they're on, really. 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 pencil.
- [74:14]
B
I remember some friends of mine, 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.
- [74:31]
A
Mess is very important.
- [74:34]
B
Yeah. Been so interesting. Maria, I've got one more question, which I always ask. How would you sum up the importance of your home in your life and the role that it plays?
- [74:46]
A
This is the house that I hope I die in. 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 not wished for experience. 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. So it really deepened a sense that I already had that the home isn't about the furnishings or the rooms. 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.
- [76:07]
B
So lovely. Thank you so much. It's been such an interesting morning. I've really appreciated it. Thank you, Maria.
- [76:12]
A
You're very welcome. It is a pleasure talking with you. Thank you.