Writing about my work:
Kate Walters’ startling images go straight from the eye to whatever emotional nexus it is that primes and enriches our inner lives. Their visionary quality is evident in both form and impulse; they are compelling for what seems a wholly instinctive fusion of the visceral with the lyrical. And they are confrontational, presenting as encounters from dream just as dream relates to those deep quotidian mysteries to which we are most often blind.
David Harsent
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Madonna della Salute
The golds on the legs of choughs streaking across the Dolomites or lemon groves exhaling in early evening, a field candled with buttercups and soft-breathing cows, gold on book spines and the ichor of a final sunshaft as towering cumulonimbus clouds thicken over the canal: all of these running into the rare quality of how you paint her tears.
Karl O’Hanlon
Excerpt from an essay accompanying an exhibition in 2022:
“The Greek word, ‘Kore’, derives from a root meaning ‘vital force’ and ‘refers to the principle that makes plants and animals grow’ (Agamben & Ferrando 2010 p 6). The Kore is any untethered girl or woman whose sexuality may be yet budding or budding again and again. It is used to refer as much to any unmarried woman who may be sexually active as to one who has not yet awoken to her sexual life. It is also used in reference to those who are old, ‘children with white hair’ such as the Erinyes.
We have here the story, and the images, of a form of human life that ‘does not allow itself to be “spoken” in so much as it cannot be defined by age, family, sexual identity of social role.’ (p7) The story was communicated in language only in so much as it is heard as a poem sung from the poetic realm.
The poetic realm is imaginal and it speaks directly from the body to the body. ” Joseph Suart, psychoanalyst
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An essay on my work by Dr. Amy Hale:
Kate Walters: Love Paintings 2022
When one imagines the representation of divine, sublime love, one might envision a visual debt to the classical philosophical tradition where love has historically been equated to beauty, to transcendence, to a sort of perfection that can only be ultimately expressed in the immaterial. This perfection of love calls to mind delicate lines, bright and light colors, lofty and idealized figures, flawless in form, unreachable. This is not the picture of divine love Kate Walters unveils in Love Paintings, but be assured it is no less perfect. This is a glimpse into the soul of a woman in love, empowered, and, knowing her true self, opens herself up to receive the divinity of the embodied Other. This love is exalted, but it is also earthy, material, present, and it can crack you open like a fragile egg, revealing your most delicate inner places. Walters does not tell us stories of distant gods, these are great powers of love inhabiting mortal bodies, experiencing delirium, transformation, and rebirth. The colors are dark, the paint is thick, the pieces are sticky and raw. Walters gives us holy love in manifestation, an eternal play enacted in flesh and fluid. This makes it no less idealistic, no less something that we can strive for, but it is something that we can know. Yet to achieve this knowledge of love, you must be prepared to be a vessel, a vehicle for the spirits to live and love through, so they can experience the bliss of conjunction through your body, to be touched, and to be undone by love’s revelation.
The key to understanding Walters’ work is to know her as a shaman. She is a walker between worlds, a spirit worker, and her art is fundamentally about bringing Spirit into the material plane. She is called to in her dreams, which become a source of knowledge from other realms and dimensions, lending a sense of uncanny perception and inspiration to her work. Yet embodiment is central to both her art and her process. Although the shamanic world is where the power that is beyond her lies, Walters uses trance, dance and motion to call Spirit forward while painting, using ecstatic techniques to release herself from the confines of the rational mind: “When you release from here, from the brain, that’s when the beauty comes. My guides will hold me and then they will show me. They won’t show me until I let go.” Walters believes that all our guides want to experience living in the world and they want to know the world through our bodies. In Love Paintings Walters asks what fires the body? What state of rapture evokes Spirit into us all?
There is no middle ground with Kate Walters’ work; it can be light, gentle and delicate, like lace or the skeleton of a leaf, or it can be earthy like thick peat, like blood. You will travel with her, and light or dark, the journey will be deep. Walters’ oeuvre demonstrates a remarkable range of techniques and emotional sensibilities. Her current project provides a stunning visual contrast to a previous series of exquisite yet eerie watercolors Walters completed during a Shetland residency in 2018. Those images are crisp, clean, with figures emerging from a dimension of calm purity, enveloped by a colorless void. That journey focused on motherhood, portraying spirits making contact through filaments, small, strange fetal figures floating in fields of white, a vision of herself before she was born, a painted child emerging from a celestial cervix.
Love Paintings indicate a bold shift in visual direction: Walters wants to move the viewer to a place of flesh, roots, and veins. These works are heavy, colorful and textural, with figures materializing through peaked and shining layers of pigment, rather than floating in empty space. Walters’ palette features vivid pinks, reds and oranges, gold and yellow, contrasting with bodies twisting together in settings marked by rich and nuanced mixtures of brown and blue. These are colors of strength, power and joy, meant to convey the frenzy of embodied longing, lust, and sexual tension. Despite the contrasts, Walters’ key preoccupation of deep ensoulment shines across her work. Even in their earthiness, Love Paintings have a frenetic, urgent quality to them, conveying the immediacy of connection and passion. Walters herself noted that these paintings “have that childlike quality of the unexpected”, yet these pieces still feel like the journeys of old souls cavorting in the material plane, bringing the bodies they inhabit into spaces of wet ecstasy and libidinal initiation.
The central narrative of Love Paintings is the story of Eros and Psyche, as both mythic and psychosexual archetypes, inhabiting the lived journey of two earthly lovers, driving their passions and their quest for wholeness. Eros and Psyche as a tale contains many layers: It is the story of the longing of the of the King and Queen of the alchemical Conjunction working to complete the Hieros Gamos, reunited after an eternity of seeking completion and searching for each other. It is also a story of the marriage of the Soul with Desire, an allegory of union with the divine. In Jungian analyst James Hillman’s landmark work The Myth of Analysis, the tale of Eros and Psyche reveals the fundamentally therapeutic, and often painful, process of soul making and refinement, the search for healing the fragmented self. Despite the lofty and otherworldly suggestions of the allegorical underpinnings, Walters’ Love Paintings are not stories about transcendent, unreachable archetypes, these are the sacred dramas enacted through our corporeal reality. The changes and consequences wrought by divine connection are very real, and not easy. Once the anima and animus are awakened though dreams and brought to awareness, how do we navigate those relationships, those entities and the insights they inspire?
This collection is not chaste, it is replete with tongues, penetration and comingling of bodies, of humans, animals, angels and monsters in moments of transformation. The bodies here are unbounded, enmeshed with each other and with sources of otherworldly wisdom, becoming both beautiful and monstrous. In Rapture (2022), Walters presents us with what appears to be an alchemical rebis, the perfected being uniting the masculine and feminine, one body with two heads, fused in desire, washed in gold, signaling the completion of the Great Work. In several works, Walters also explores Tantric traditions and metaphors. In Lovers in a Dream of Life Force (2020) two bodies share the exaltation of rising kundalini, conjoined in an exchange of light and energy. The connection of our lovers here has an oracular, rapturous quality, their physical connection creating the channel for divine possession and insight.
Eyes and lips are a recurring motif, suggesting the portals through which energy and knowledge is passed into the bodies of our lovers. These eyes do not just witness, they also provide clear sight, emerging from the spaces in between bodies or arising up on bodies in unexpected places, because for Walters, divine love is visionary. In Drawing up Cosmic Sight (2022) and Eros Caressing Psyche (2022) we see the woman pulling divine power into her body through her yoni, itself a portal for connection and also for knowing. In Falling Together, Rising Together from the Contours of Time, (2022) and the yoni itself becomes an eye, a conduit for the passing of the wisdom of the Gods between lovers. The phallus also provides the means for the transfer of astral intelligence. In I Dreamed of You Painting; You Were Ecstatic (2022) the woman is carried by the man on his shoulders as she is being penetrated with a stream of energy from his crown chakra, an image that is at once supportive, nurturing, and deeply transformative.
For all the fierceness of these images, Walters expresses a great deal of rawness and vulnerability in these paintings. Before Eros and Psyche achieve the union of divine bliss, Psyche must complete several trials assigned to her by the Goddess of Love herself. The culmination of Psyche’s travails is a trip to the underworld to retrieve the secret of beauty to be presented to Venus. Many of Walters’ images capture the pain and pleasure of this journey, the ways in which the openness to love forces an unraveling of one’s self. The seemingly ominous title, Body of Wounding and Streaming Piercings (2021) contrasts with the image of a bright figure covered in punctures, highlighted by opalescent blues and a near bubble gum pink. Despite her many wounds, light pours out from her torn flesh and her bodily orifices. Her face is frightened, perhaps also ecstatic, as fountains of energy stream forth in brilliant torrents from the top of her head.
Walters paints injured and broken souls seeking restoration and completion, with the promise of lovers reborn and, in some way, purified. In Wounded Angel with Wounded Man (2021) two figures, one dark one golden, face each other directly, with clarity and purpose, witnessed by spirits in their connection. Divine love also serves here as a vehicle for the healing of the inner child, with the nurturing lover taking many roles as savior, parent, priest and midwife. As in Walters’ other collections, childbirth is a recurring theme here and Love Paintings features several images of birth, and generation. He Draws Her Out of Me, (2021) and He Delivers Me (2021) are very literal images of childbirth, but the magical child in these pieces seems to not be a separate entity, but a metaphor for transition into a new state. In Little Kate Comes Back from the Light, (2021) we see the happy return and integration of the healed child.
In the end, Psyche becomes an immortal, blissfully united with her love Eros for eternity, but her arduous journey has been one of alchemical refinement, a powerful confrontation with death, mortality and rebirth through encounters with the Other and also with the self. Love Paintings teach us how, in love, our spirits possess and transform each other, and ultimately, how we possess ourselves. They are a reminder of what we can become when we are lovers, how, in connection, we give birth to each other and how, through love, we make each other sacred.
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Writing on my work by another artist, Marie-Claire Hamon:
When I was in Anchor Studio (part of the Borlase Smart John Wells Trust) in December 2023 Marie-Claire came to visit me. This is what she wrote, afterwards…
The main reason for visiting Kate was her opening her temporary studio space at Anchor studios to show us the work she has been making for her upcoming show with the Arusha gallery in London. I stepped into the studio, Kate was catching up with eating her breakfast at 12.30 pm, she disciplines herself not to eat before that time in the morning. She swiftly finished eating, as we engaged with what really mattered, her work. Oh my, what energy, a sprawl of large canvases was scattered on easels and on the walls, leaning against other canvases on the floor. The large space was full. It was alive. It felt like a rhythmic march, none of the work settled where it was, it was all interchangeable, they were all related, writhing forms, squirming, agitated, reaching out, recoiling in themselves, then losing it in sheer abandon to the energy of eros, the marks and wildness of colour. A storm had blown through the studio, the canvases had caught it as it swirled through the head of the artist, as I watched I was caught up in the intensity of the colour and gesture left suspended in mid air on every piece. The paintings are raw, erotic, the colour is at times garish, German expressionism comes to mind, there is no holding back, no politeness, no tastefulness, just pure interjection and ejaculations of the subconscious mind and soul. The conversation with Kate is always intense, totally assured of her work and its direction, there is a feeling of total faith in herself and her painting which becomes contagious in her presence. When she recounts her experience, she shoots from the hip, and you can hear snakes hissing around her studio as they dance to her tune and wait to be regularly summoned into power. There is a menagerie of spirit animals creeping around her space but the horse, her lover, remains steadfastly her favourite as it embodies her relationship with life, death, sex and the subconscious. I left the studio feeling inspired and energized.
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A few days later later, Estelle Thistleton wrote this, after visiting my studio:
I expected to meet an artist and realise that much more than that you are shaman straddling many realities, bringing back to the rest of us in this physicality the multi dimensional experience of your intimate inner life. It’s one thing to understand inner realities as philosophical theory, or even open up to it as personal practice, and quite another to be such a powerful vehicle for its expression. I am full of respect for the task you are set upon, I think it takes a great deal of courage and talent to be so exposed and expressive. Most of us are on a desperate mission to cover it all up!
Reading the feedback from your workshop participants the extent to which you enable them to access the magical and mystical realms is testimony to your own journeying. Your Hollow Bone work is the most akin to my own experience of opening to channelling which I have experienced a lot.
Whilst writing this and wondering how to express how I feel about our meeting The Hierophant sprang to mind. In most Tarot readings this represents the Pope as a figure of ultimate spiritual power, (not one I subscribe to obviously) however, if one explores the symbolism further it is really expressing the Divine Masculine in direct relation to the already initiated Divine Feminine of the High Priestess, and in that meaning I can see why it came to mind regarding your journey. It’s the time of the dark Supermoon just now, so a powerful time of dreaming and insights. For all of us, owning our divine feminine and allowing the divine masculine to rise is an enormous challenge, so little basis for trust when we have all felt so utterly betrayed, thank you for being a truly inspiring and courageous leader in that vital struggle.
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A Love Letter to my painting…. written by me in 2021.
In the painting you lay out for me a bed of broad tongues. They spread out from your navel, muscular antennae which I sense across the room when I come to sit with you. Your tongues are silent and attentive. There are things I don’t understand yet. Sometimes your tongues move slowly, from side to side; but mostly they’re quite still, resting heavily on the floor between us. They grow larger, swelling with a sweet blood and glistening with a deep redness; curling slightly at their edges with their blue veined muscularity. The tips come close to me and I become aroused, but I remain still. Sometimes your tongues seem to have a life of their own. They’re descended from sea-creatures, they taste of salt, I taste them on my lips. They wash in the mouth of the room like whales’ tongues in the immense seas of their bodies. A song rests on them. I pick it up.
We become two tongues in one mouth.
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To see more examples of my writing please go to my blog pages on this site.
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Rev.d Dr. Richard Davey wrote the following about my Shetland-inspired watercolours, in 2017:
Painting is a physical and decisive act: a mark initiating a world, forcing a form into existence, drawing ephemeral fragments from the imagination into physical being. Paint builds – it structures and shapes, leaving a pigment deposit on paper and canvas; allowing formless things to become concrete, drawing the invisible into perceivable being. But this is not what we encounter in Kate Walters’ Shetland watercolours. These are not paintings that build form, but vehicles through which we are pulled into formlessness; encounters with the ephemeral rather than the physical, a breath of pigment deposited onto paper that suggests figures and forms without defining their solid presence. Figures float into being, still tethered into the void, their weightless form a hesitant proposition. The origin of these tentative creatures was a dream granted to Walters when she was recently staying on Shetland; a vision of her foetal form cast adrift in a disembodied uterus, its unbounded body free of physical constraints, floating in interconnected communion with the universe. It is perhaps unsurprising that such a dream should have come on Shetland, a thin space where physical boundaries are dissolved in the constant ebb and flow that blends sea and shore in a swirling, unresolved flux. As she watched seals blur the line between sea and air and terns draw soaring patterns in the air before plunging into crystalline waters, Walters herself became a shamanic hollow bone, a conduit between the physical and immaterial realms. In her sketches she is seal, fulmar, tern and foetus, a boundary crosser, diving into a cosmic space before birth and after death where everything is held in unresolved, undifferentiated potential.
An extract of an essay written by Professor Penny Florence in 2019::
TREMENHEERE GALLERY. SEPTEMBER 7TH – OCTOBER 2ND 2019.
The Tree of Thought: The Art of Kate Walters by Professor Penny Florence
Kate Walters’ art speaks clearly. Yet because it is visceral, communicating to our bodies first, it can
be easy to underestimate the quality of thought it embodies.
Embodied thought addresses the kind of understanding that bypasses spoken or written language
because it is deeper. Precisely because it embodies rather than explains or narrates, it is not didactic;
Walters never preaches.
There is, nonetheless, a powerful and consistent message. It concerns the big questions: what does it
mean to be fully human; what is our place in the natural world; where are we going; questions that
echo Gauguin’s great philosophical work, D’où venons-nous, Que sommes-nous, Où allons-nous?
But, unlike Gauguin, the work does not so much pose questions as feel its way towards articulating
the mysteriousness of being.
This is a Shamanic understanding of what many of the ancient religions variously call the Path or the
Way – and Walters is a fully initiated Shaman. This is not a casual or loose similarity, but rather the
long-term commitment that underpins her art.
So what is this Shamanic terrain? It is paradoxical, because it is fully aware, yet indirectly evoked. If
you compare Child with Plant Wand and Buds with Babies , the eye-leaves of the first appear to be the
seed-children of the second, who resemble the child holding the plant. These eyes suggest insight as
much as sight, awareness and receptiveness to the cycle of rebirth, to movement out and movement in,
like breathing.
It’s an effect that reminds me of what Maleno Barretto said of the intrepid Margaret Mee (both
botanical artists), ‘She seems to be inside the plant’ . This suggests that art does 1 not distinguish us
from Nature, but rather is integral to it. Many of us who have known individual animals well
understand the absurdity of the idea that they don’t think. It’s the result of projecting our ways of
thinking onto creatures whose experience of the world is different.
But plants? There is increasing scientific evidence that plants, especially trees, do indeed think. The
interdependence of trees, for example, is such that they form something very like a community. Theirs
is a collectivity based on communication. It is extensive and applies to the entire tree: apparently their
more widely known capacity to warn each other of insect attack through the release of hormones
above ground, and to take defensive action, is complemented underground, partly through the
intermediary of fungi. Fungi are neither plant nor animal, but a form of life in between.2
1 Botanical Art & Artists.com About Margaret Mee (1909-1988) (Malu De Martino on Vimeo.) Walters has recently looked
at the work and thought of Mee, along with Simryn Gill and the filmmaker and gardener, Derek Jarman.
2 See my forthcoming book Thinking the Sculpture Garden (Routledge, Jan 2020) for further discussion of this research.
The book is inspired by, and revolves around, Tremenheere.