My artwork on Marc Almond’s album The Velvet Trail ….

 

Marc Almond tweeting about the official artwork by Kate Walters for his forthcoming album 'The Velvet Trail' - looking forward to her show 'With Closed Eyes', Millennium, 20/2 - www.millenniumgallery.co.uk/withclosedeyes/work.htm

Marc Almond tweeting about the official artwork by Kate Walters for his forthcoming album ‘The Velvet Trail’ – looking forward to her show ‘With Closed Eyes’, Millennium, 20/2 – www.millenniumgallery.co.uk/withclosedeyes/work.htm

Peter Parkinson's photo.
Peter Parkinson's photo.

 

January, February…Bridport Arts Centre, Aberdeen, Cornwall Today magazine, WMN, The Plough Arts Centre, and Millennium….

Mid January saw the opening of a show at Bridport Arts Centre, the Theatre of the Soul, in which I have seven pieces of work – old friends, many of them….

Becoming the stillness of animals Watercolour on gesso 35 x 25 cm 2011     Kate's pictures Bridport

 

 

 

I heard that my proposal to be part of the Fallen Animals conference at Aberdeen University has been accepted, so I will heading North in March to be part of that….and I enjoyed being interviewed by Alex Wade for Cornwall Today (out Jan/Feb) and by Roger Malone  for the Western Morning News, due out February 7th.

 

Last night my solo show at the Plough Arts Centre opened in Torrington, north Devon. I thought the installation looked beautiful, and I was very pleased to receive very positive comments from visitors.

The Plough show    Installation view the Plough  email invite (1)

Sleeping in the Mountain Tree framed   I will be giving a talk on Saturday February 28th at 10.30. followed by a workshop on drawing and inner creativity until 4.30, when the show will end. Please contact the art centre to book.

 

On February 20th February at 7 pm my solo show With Closed Eyes will open at Millennium in St Ives (and run until March 24th).

This will be first show with Millennium in four years, and I am very excited about it. Susan Daniel-McElroy  (ex-Director of Tate St. Ives and Oriel Mostyn) will be writing an essay to support and introduce the work.

Here are a couple of images which will be showing…more in next post!

Diviner watercolour on paper laid on linen

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Espacio Gallery, January 2015, flyer…

AGGs Eflyer with opening times    I will be here ( January 10& 11 from 1 – 6 pm), making drawing and monotypes by ‘tuning-in’ to visitors, and responding to your dreams and inner impulses.

There will be a small charge to cover materials and expenses, and you will be able to take your drawing away…

The red watercolours

Tidying up a bit in my studio the other day I found 4 old catalogues – most were destroyed in a flood, so I am very pleased to have found them, and to be able to re-visit these old images from 2008, and to see that they are strong. A few have been sold, most over-worked, as I grew tired of the comments about the red, and people’s fear of it.

Here are some photos from the catalogue:

Catalogue cover, Seeing the Shadow.
Catalogue cover, Seeing the Shadow.

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These last two were shown in the Jerwood Drawing Prize 2008.

 

Creative Elements on-line magazine, next issue, November; Claude Cahun at Tate St. Ives, Bracha Ettinger, re-visiting…

I was interviewed a few weeks ago by Philipa and John from Creative Elements magazine, and the new edition will go live in the next few days. I will post the link as soon as I have it. The drafts look good though, I’m really pleased!

I recently had an afternoon off, and visited the new Tate St. Ives photography show with Penny Florence. I loved the very tiny works made whilst out on walks, and also, especially, the Claude Cahun works, which have prompted me to look again at feminism, psychoanalysis, and surrealism. Laura Gascoigne wrote about my work within that context, and it’s taken me a while to see the sense of her contextualising. I loved Cahun’s photographs because of the way she placed the female form – her own body – within the photograph, and her relationship with natural forms and her own body parts: She plays with her form in a poetic and mildly disconcerting way. How the seaweed, the wavy strands, surround her pubic area providing a sea-ish skirt, a hairy growing of fronds. Or her crown growing skywards, egg-suggesting, bald.

The ice-egg held up to the sky by tiny hands, looking like those of children, and I made drawings from these, and twins appeared, joined at the navel. I love it when an image readily suggests, grows happily, eagerly, into new forms.

I’ve had Bracha Ettinger’s book The Matrixial Borderspace for some time, and it appears to me, that whichever page I open it at offers me a pertinent insight for the work I happen to be making.

Here are some passages from the book I find particularly useful in helping me to understand what I am doing with my work, and also, how/why viewers of my work can respond the way they do:

Metramorphosis is a co-naissance – knowledge of being-born-together – which is not cognitive and does not enter direct representation. We can nevertheless reflect on it, taking into account the errors introduced by Symbolic language. We can also grasp it in painting, if the painting accedes to the appearance of the memory of oblivion, to the blind memory of I and non-I lodging in me without my self-control. Metramorphic relation is neither Oedipal nor even pre-Oedopal. It is a non-phallic erotic co=response-ability: a Eurydician tuning of the erotic aerials of the psyche, always in dangerous proximity to Thanatos. (p.144).

In the passage from the phallic gaze to the matrixial gaze, we leave the zone of desire for an object, caused by a missing object. We move away from the question of phantasy, into a sphere where desire is for borderlinking and the “object of desire” is not an absence or lack but a process of disappearance whose basis is a traumatic encounter….

Matrixial awareness channels the subject’s desire, mixed with fascination and horror, towards beauty and pain, the trauma of others. My awareness cannot master you through the traces in my psyche, and there is no joining without separation, nor separating without joining. the desire to join-in difference and differentiate-in-co-emerging with the Other does not promise peace and harmony, because joining is first of all a joining with-in the other’s trauma that echoes back to my archaic traumas:joining the other matrixially is always joining the m/Other and rising mental fragmentation and vulnerability. A matrixial gaze gives rise to it’s own desire, which can generate dangerous encounters, because here desire is not separated from fascination, and the Other is not cut off from its jouissance.. (p.147).

Yesterday whilst working on a new, dense, shadowy work a dog appeared from the deep, a mountain dog, a dog who finds those whoa re lost, who also nurses;  a breast was growing from her neck, white and running with milk which she calmly observed, but which I could not make sense of. I washed over it. I will return to it, maybe re-instate the breast? Milk from throat is  suggested. Milk with speech. Milk-coated words, white words, words which are wet and which feed.

New work, plans for January

I have very recently completed a work which has taken me around two years to finish. I began it soon after my precious girl dog died, in July 2012. Soon after she died she came to me in a dream, and from above she gave me her skin. I understood the gift of her skin to be a great gift, so I began a piece of work in which I was holding the edges of the skin, the tips between my fingers, with it over my head like a sail or sky of skin. This high sky with its tender underbelly became a struggle to realise and to complete. Now I think it is complete and I see that for me the line of nipples represent the belly of Heaven, the milk of Heaven. I’ve been reading Marina Warner’s great book about the Virgin Mary, and the chapter on the gift of milk is illuminating and beautiful. Where the manifestations of the physical and the divine meet.

The Sin-Eaters watercolour and gum arabic on paper 56 x 63 cm 2014   I have called the picture The Sin Eaters, after reading about the souls who eat the sins of those who wish to enter Heaven.

London: I will be working with Marc Almond again in London in December, and in January I will be working with the Freedom Collective, at the Espacio Gallery, making anti-art: I’ll be working with monotype to tune into people who will become co-creators of drawings and monotypes.

Dark Mountain, coming home from London, working with Marc Almond….

I had a hectic two days, going to London on the early train; reading Marina Warner and Elisabeth Bronfen. I saw a young cow and a black bird chasing a large fox from their field, in a playful way, it was great. I thought of my day ahead, and felt supported. Walking up Park Lane I saw three very fat sleek cars outside the Dorchester Hotel. One was a Bugatti, it looked gold-plated….I felt somewhat un-groomed as I drew near to Mayfair…

Working with Marc was again a huge pleasure and I was very pleased with the works I made in response to him sitting quietly near me. We  spoke of the birds in our gardens, and the animals in our lives. Marc talked about the old beliefs that you could have three dogs in your life, and when you died, they would all be waiting for you at the gates of Heaven. I love this thought!

At home all I wanted to do, after London, was be in our beautiful little garden, such a jewel of brightness and richness. I picked a bunch of cosmos and a handful of tomatoes. In the post there as a parcel, it was the new Dark Mountain book, a real beauty, and I was delighted to see how gorgeous my painting looked inside. So proud! Thank you Charlotte du Cann and the Dark Mountain team.

 Feeding from the fire below Watercolour on canvas 50 x 80 cm Kate Walters 2012

Birds bathing in the garden

Dartmoor, wilderness, Salve and Shield of my Heart.

The beauties of Dartmoor have helped me to re-establish my equilibrium. Walking on the springy turf, with sky before, behind and above is the greatest joy for me. Sweeping moor, clad in purple, gold and green serves as the shield and garland of my heart. Tiny churches with ancient yew trees as guardians provide another sanctuary. I look up, and keeping still and quiet, see the raven come with her croaky call; buzzard above calls me Heavenwards; I draw clouds, I see the souls of babies there, bodies growing softly, enormously, smiling there above me like the face of my mother I saw moments after her death. How happy she looked as she sailed skywards!

Little crowd of sheep, Dartmoor, September 14        Baby sky

Frankie being a pin up on Dartmoor, September 14        ancient Yew Tree, Holne churchyard.

Garden, Buckfast Abbey Sept 14      web spiderlings stretching like smoke

Saints of the rood Screen Holne Church.     Holne church interior with fine rood screen

 

Holne Church rood screen 1480      On Dartmoor, looking at Frankie

On Dartmoor with ponies and dogs, long walk!

New work, working in London with Marc Almond

I have been exploring working with the tiny traces which appear almost by magic on the paper when I am playing with the watercolour and the gum arabic, in the early stages of the work. I am calling this one ‘Of Blood and Spirit’… it seems to be about two manifestations of the same being, perhaps complementary aspects, flesh or blood and spirit, feminine, masculine, dark, light, sanguine, aerial…

Of Blood and Spirit, 2014

 

Yesterday I went to London on the 5am train. It was a great fast service and I arrived in Mayfair before 11 am, to work with Marc Almond on visual material for his new album. He spoke about his childhood and beloved Southport but mostly he sat quietly with closed yes as I closed my eyes too and tuned into him, and allowed the images to come, to flow, to grow. I was amazed by the clarity of the images which came. Really happy with my work, which was such a good feeling. I was making monotypes on thin gampi paper.

Scurrying to Paddington before 5pm (no time for Selfridges or similar!), I found my eyes pricking with tears, as always, as I walked down the platform to my Penzance train. So happy to be coming home! And remembering my Dad who went through Paddington station every day of his working life, and whose ghost now keeps watch over the bike racks, where his skip-retreived-hand-painted two-wheeled masterpiece still is locked….