Maria Balshaw on Creative Rebellion, Life After the Tate & The House as a Container
3/19/20261 hr 17 min
Beyond the whirlwind of galleries and exhibitions, Tate Director Maria Balshaw's home holds the quieter, deeply personal moments of her life.
Growing up in Northampton, she longed to escape her characterless new-build house and nurtured a desire to be different. Her current home in Kent is a reflection of that creative rebellion, with medieval beams at its centre, classical sash windows on one side and Crittalls on the other.
Maria grows vegetables in her garden year-round, swims in the sea nearby, and measures time by what’s coming into flower – a way to be at one...
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First 90 secondsMaria Balshaw· Guest0:00
[gentle music] 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, but I wanted to be different from the norm. You're never not the director of an organization like Tate.
Matt Gibberd· Host0:40
Mm.
Maria Balshaw· Guest0:40
So you can have holidays, but, you know, y- the organization's always still running, and it's time now that I have a bit more time for all the other things.
Matt Gibberd· Host0:50
Hi, Maria.
Maria Balshaw· Guest0:57
Hello.
Matt Gibberd· Host0:58
Thank you so much for, for being on Homing. Um, we always start back at the beginning.
Maria Balshaw· Guest1:03
Mm-hmm.
Matt Gibberd· Host1:03
So tell me about your childhood home. Where did you grow up?
Maria Balshaw· Guest1:06
The house I spent most of my childhood in was in Northampton. Um, we moved there when I was five. So I remember other houses, one in Leicester and my grandmother's house. But, um, this was a new house, a new development on the edge of Northampton, and my dad had moved there for his job. Um, he was ... He worked in parks, and so he did parks and development,