Curatorspace have kindly written a great feature on exciting events about to happen:

https://www.curatorspace.com/about/news/featured-artist-kate-walters/66

I’m very excited to be heading to Worcester University to speak on my work generated by residencies in Shetland; in particular a strong dream I had where I saw myself before I was born – which has lead to around 500 watercolours being made. I’m now returning to my first love, oil paint, to articulate and negotiate thoughts and feelings around fluids – sap, blood, milk: milk being the bodily expression of motherly love.

https://www.illustrationresearch.org/booking-current-cfp

After that I’ll be travelling to London to see some exhibitions, and to be part of this event:

  

TREMENHEERE GALLERY. SEPTEMBER 7TH – OCTOBER 2ND 2019.

The Tree of Thought: The Art of Kate Walters

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.

Perhaps we might call this capacity to see into the life of things ‘Natural Intelligence’, not in

opposition to ‘Artificial Intelligence’, but as a complement. ‘Human Intelligence’ is only one form.

Mee always worked entirely from living plants, usually in their natural setting and including their

habitat, unlike conventional botanical illustrators. In this way, she shows that that they are integral to

their environment, an inseparable part of it. To capture the enigmatic Moonflower (Selenicereus

wittii), which blooms once and night and then dies, she balanced half the night astride a narrow canoe.

She risked herself alone with nature in order to convey the living energy of an organism in its habitat.

And it is a risk; like her, Walters risks herself. The result is demanding work that rewards the

concentrated looking of open awareness.

Truly look at the works in this show and you will see that living energy, a life-force that unites

everything that lives and breathes; for, as Simryn Gill, another artist admired by Walters, said, “If the

botanical world falters, so do we.” Our ability to breathe has evolved in exact synergy 3 with theirs. It

is an understanding that demands action and restraint from harm, a thoughtfulness about balance and

care. In this it is political; in Gill’s case, against colonial exploitation; in Walters’, in support of

Extinction Rebellion (XR) and taking personal responsibility.4

At the same time, the works are underpinned by a structural precision belied by their fluidity and

softness. This aspect of the work is evidenced in the approaches of two other artists Walters admires,

Christine Ödlund and David Thorpe. Both explore geometry and growth.

This sense of co-emergence is conveyed not only through form, but also through technique. There are

four methods in this show: watercolour, monotype, spit bite etchings, or a combination; and oil. Take

for example Kate’s three spit bite etchings: Breath of Plant or Horse ; Horse with Child and Planet ;

Mother Bird Feeds Human Infant. Perhaps the main characteristics of spit bite etchings are textural

similarity of figure and ground and closeness in feel to watercolour. And yes, spit can be an

ingredient, though not always. It seems completely appropriate here.

The image is not materially differentiated from its surround; it’s a matter of degree and, more subtly,

of construction, as in the figure-ground instability of Seeing Tree or Storm, World Tree with

Cocooned Infants and Untitled . Plant, tree, animal, bird and human life all materialise in these works

in the gap that is ambiguity, all part of the same miraculous planetary process. The oils foreground the

kinds of emergence to which the medium is so perfectly suited. Colour, marks (both ends of the brush)

and a fragile symmetry create a textural and layered becoming in which the animals both support and

merge into the human and plant forms, from birth to dissolution. From a distance, the palette and

composition evoke C17th Dutch still life masters; ‘still’ life here meaning ‘always’, not ‘motionless’.

They form a Tree of Thought.

For anyone who thinks they know more than this planetary tree, I offer this couplet from William

Blake’s Auguries of Innocence:

The Bat that flits at close of Eve

Has left the Brain that won’t believe

3 https://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-modern/display/simryn-gill

4 See Programme and Tremenheere website for events associated with the show.

Opening September 6th at 6 pm!

I have great pleasure in inviting you to my forthcoming exhibition at Tremenheere Gallery, which I am sharing with friends.

  

I’m honoured to be part of this selected exhibition, opening the evening of July 19th.

I’ll be showing 51 works from my recent watercolour sequences, in the beautiful Chapter House of Wells Cathedral.

More very soon on my recent wonderful trip to Orkney and Shetland.

http://stridemagazine.blogspot.com/2019/04/other-ways-of-seeing.html

Thank you Rupert Loydell for this great review.

A few more images inpsired by residencies on Shetland:

Here are two of my works from my recent exhibition at Arusha Gallery in Edinburgh – my first there in five years.

I was very pleased with how the exhibition looked; there was a great crowd at the opening on February 28th; and many people bought copies of my new book, Shetland Notebooks & Sketchbooks, published by Guillemot Press.

The next book launch will be at Tremenheere Gallery just outside Penzance, on April 13th, at 3 pm, when my publisher Luke Thompson and I will talk about the book, and then at 3.30 we will lead a workshop on walking and writing (£15 per person). This event is part of the next Newlyn Society of Artists exhibition, entitled Ex Libris, which has it’s Opening Event on April 6th at 2pm (until 6pm).

Here is the link to the exhibition of British artists from the South West, opening this week at Agora Gallery in New York.

https://www.agora-gallery.com/ExhibitionAnnouncement/Discovery_11_10_2018.aspx

And this is the link to the page of my work:

https://www.agora-gallery.com/artistpage/Kate_Walters.aspx

 this is one of the works in the exhibition in New York…

And in York, U.K., at the New Schoolhouse Gallery, from now until the end of January:

NOW SHOWING: KATE WALTERS
THE START THAT FALLS FROM HEAVEN

Penzance-based artist Kate Walters’ The Start that Falls from Heaven is an extraordinary, deeply moving exhibition of works in oil and watercolour that were predominantly completed on the isles of Shetland and Iona. The exhibition overflows with motifs of the feminine, the mythical and the natural world and asks: What does it mean to be human, knowing, and living in the anthropocene age?

Here are some images:

Ghost Tide:

I was very happy to be part of Ghost Tide, an exhibition curated by Monika Bobinska and Sarah Sparkes, at Thames Side Studios in London recently. I spent an afternoon offering ‘hollow bone’ sessions (funded by Arts Council England); the pictures show me doing this work with visitors to the exhbition. This work was done in a ceremonial way, with drumming, trance,  and song.

http://www.canalprojects.info/exhibition.php?Id=87

I’m very pleased to have my work included in this year’s Black Swan Open.

This work has been selected, together with a few supporting studies….