I’m recently returned from a long weekend in Edinburgh where I had a stand at The Artists Book Market at The Fruitmarket Gallery. I also gave a presentation on my work around adapting found books, with a focus on Trauma and what we find Unspeakable.
I spoke about my dream in Venice which led to a big change for me, and which I have drawn many times…
and I also spoke about my publications with Guillemot Press: Iona notebooks and Shetland Notebooks, and how important the residencies in those wild places were for me…
(we are now hatching plans for a new book…)
I had some very interesting encounters at the market, and some sales. The encounters were the most important, and the new people I met and the old friends I re-connected with…
My journey home was eventful with train chaos, but I was at least able to draw into my books on the journey… and then after two days at home catching my breath and packing, I was away again to North Devon, to Braunton and Studio KIND for my solo show in this lovely Arts Council funded artist’s project space.
here are a few of the works in the show, and details of opening times and of my creative, shamanic workshop on the Inner Child to be held on March 18th from 2 – 5 pm…
and here are some more images from the show… photo by Studio KIND photo by Studio KIND photo by Studio KIND photo by Studio KIND photo by Studio KIND of the collaborative pages made by me and Joseph Suart
Sweetheart. Darling. Tits.
Installation of drawings in watercolour sticks, oil pastels and oak gall ink on River Tomoe paper.
The exhibition continues until March 17th.
Archive boxes of watercolours are available to purchase at very affordable prices.
Unspeakable Joseph Suart February 2023
In 2010 the philosopher Giorgio Agamben and the painter Monica Ferrando published a book titled La ragazza indicible. Mito e mistero di Kore. Agamben’s essay in this publication was translated in 2014 by Leland de la Durantaye under the title The Unspeakable Girl: the Myth and Mystery of Kore. In the first footnote of this translation, with reference to the word ‘unspeakable’ the translator points out that ‘neither the Greek term nor the Italian one with which the author translates it possesses the English word’s suggestion of impish or malicious misbehaviour. Given the alternative between the idiomatic unspeakable and the calque unsayable, I deemed the former truer to the original.’
In the 15th footnote, with reference to the word ‘in-fantile’, the translator notes Agamben is using it in its literal meaning – ‘being without speech’ – emphasising that this is not about limiting the description to a pre-verbal child and pointing out this is a theme Agamben explores in other works. In this essay Agamben uses it to describe the state of being that is experienced by the participants in the Eleusinian Mystery rites once they have been confronted with the presence of the gods. This is not to be conflated with the developmental stage of being pre-verbal, nor with that of being struck dumb or rendered speechless. It describes access to a state of being and not a symptomatic reaction to shock or amazement. We are being directed towards a subverting of the hierarchical arrangement of experience whereby feeling is considered primarily as a precursor to thinking, which then employs words to establish a supposedly more developed understanding. So, ordinarily in our culture, experience that can be communicated through words is privileged over direct experience which is thereby reduced to the pre-verbal. These two footnotes point out that Agamben uses these words specifically to present an alternative to this hierarchy. In this work of Agamben’s there is an exploration of what is not captured by the definition of the human as being the speaking animal.
In the third book of his Homer Sacer series, Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive, Agamben writes about those who were named ‘muselmann’ because of the complete unresponsiveness to which they had been reduced by their utter exhaustion through forced labour and starvation. These people, pushed to the extremity of what could be recognised as human, embody the ‘impossibility of bearing witness to what happened’ (Agamben 1998 p53-54). He quotes Primo Levi’s view that the muselmann was ‘he who had seen the Gorgon’, by which Agamben suggests that the ‘impossibility of vision’ initiated by the gorgon provides the frozen dynamic between that which simultaneously can be neither seen nor looked away from. It is impossible to bear witness to that which remains of the human when all aspects of humanity have been stripped away to the mere state of ‘bare life’. And yet in this condition knowledge of it is simultaneously unavoidable. The muselman is the embodiment of one who can no longer avoid the impossibility of knowing and seeing what is there before him. His state of embodied inhumanity demands the attention of the human and this and only this is testimony. This state is one that would be accurately described as traumatic.
In The Unspeakable Girl Agamben notes that when Jung and Kerenyi published Einfuhrung in das Wesen der Mythologie (The Science of Mythology) in Nazi-occupied Amsterdam they hid its contents under a misleading title. For, far from reinforcing rigid gender stereotypes as the Nazi censor would have required, the contents show that the ‘Myth of the Divine Child and the Mysteries of Eleusis’ are founded upon the inherent archetypal ambiguity of the figure of the ‘Urkind – an originary child’ which is ‘seen […] above all in its androgeny’ (Agamben & Ferrando 2010 p.3). This specific and extensive indeterminacy is repeated in the hermaphroditism of the child archetype and it is this very quality that is shown to be necessary for a progressively redemptive capacity and the ability to supervene conflict.
Ancestral voices calling down the years in and through our culture:
‘Your long golden tongue’, Hermes and Aphrodite coming into one, leaping into and out of the blue under the watchful eye of the horse spirit;
‘She has her stalk he said’, being held one by the other they become, together
Furthermore, Kore, the ‘divine girl’, central figure of the story of Persephone’s abduction and rape by Hades, itself the basis for the Eleusinian Mystery rites for the renewal of life, increases this indeterminacy in a very disturbing fashion. The attribution ‘Kore’ didn’t only apply to Persephone, or young girl, but resists the patriarchal divisions of girl/virgin, (married)woman/mother and crone/grandmother.
Kore: girl, mother and the White haired ones:
‘Conceiving, carrying bearing’
‘Hag’: lost, dissolved, emerging from the brutal blood death/birth
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 yet still powerful, ‘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 or social role’ (Agamben & Ferrando 2010 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.
We read the story of Persephone, Kore, as that of a teenage girl being abducted and raped by her uncle.
‘All the names my father called me’ ‘Tits Bird’
But what if Persephone, daughter of the goddess of fecundity, was overwhelmed by her own burgeoning exuberance and sexuality as it pushed up from inside her like an iris budding in the morning? Pushing up and calling towards the Earth around her with the Sea-breeze and the Sun-warmth. The warming Earth, and the Sun and the Sea, are calling back and drawing the budding upwards and upwards.
She is with friends on the cliffs in the warm Spring sunshine, a gentle sea breeze is ruffling the down on their arms, playing around their ears and their knees as they laugh and bend to smell the flowers, picking them in abundance.
‘Persephone holds the flower’ ‘Persephone, Sunseed’
It is in delight that she is drawn into the face of the flower, kissed into kissing and infiltrated by that irresistible scent; it tickles her nose and slips itself into her, sending a frisson down through her body and out over her skin, spreading and awakening her. What can this be that is stealing over and through her as never before? She doesn’t know what is happening and she can’t stop. Everything is different: the way it looks, the way it feels, the way she feels. Everything is new. Again. Each time she opens her eyes and feels her skin respond. And she is aching for more of it but doesn’t know what it is. This is like it is the very first time. She puts the pomegranate seed in her mouth and nuzzles its sharp flavour with her tongue till it sweetens and creeps down her throat. She is not the one she was before. Everything is gone. No one saw it happen and no one knows where she is. She has disappeared.
‘I love him so’ ‘Lovers’ ‘Making love in every particle’
And with that sexually creative sensuality comes the silent knowledge of death, unnoticed until too late. Unavoidable. Necessary.
Is Trauma what happens when a god takes possession of us without our consent?
‘With Death as my advisor’: prayer child arising from a falling vulva with a contained challenge of aliveness and tension in the line and expression
Trauma: not only the result of annihilatory treatment in the Death Camps.
Trauma: also the silent and unnoticed introduction of death, slipping in where it was least expected and in the very moment when we are opening our budding selves up to the world. The butterfly. Even if predicted, the unknown event lies in wait until long after it can no longer be avoided.
Trauma: unspeakable.
‘Tears of sperm (from his weeping eyes) pour into me, I rise up’
There is a sudden jolt as you realise that you are being treated as if you were someone else. The child has been abducted and given a new name. She is never the same again. Snatched and gone. She, he, they, we, are spoken to as someone else. We have forgotten who they are and we don’t know what happened to them. No memory. He only knows he is here on a temporary basis and one day, somehow, he must find a way back to them. He hadn’t till then known that somewhere below there is a huge space where once his life would have been. The full effect of the destructive moment only becomes known once you are way past the tipping point into the turmoil. I fell through the swirling centre, pulled in and down headlong, unending. All those photos, all those posts, all those likes. Still-falling without understanding; silent scream-rushes in my throat. The one who remains walks under a different name, unsure who is the ghost: them or their other?
The trauma of social media: it offers you the chance to cancel yourself through the lure of constructing who you thought you wanted to be.
Someone has been ghosted. Someone is being cancelled. I can’t remember them. All.
In the story of Wolf Alice a young girl is found in the woods by the nuns and rescued back to their convent. She is filthy and goes on all fours and huddles growling in the corner snarling at them. She doesn’t hear words of love, and never has, but she has felt the tongue of love from her wolf-mother. Though named by Wolf Alice, is she not also vitalised by Kore and so Persephone by another name? Is she not ‘the bud of flesh in the kind lion’s mouth’ (A. Carter 1979)? Untameable, she is given to the Duke who feeds on the dead, exhuming recent graves in the local churchyard at night, lurching off with a recent-bride’s torso slung over his shoulder. Death is all around her and she is unafraid. She watches the moon waxing to full and is awoken by the bleeding between her legs. The Duke of Death is ambushed and shot. And Wolf Alice, newly emerging into herself under the gentle caress of her own care, is able to share that loving touch with him. Her loving tongue soothes him as he struggles to survive the wounds of murderous intent inflicted by the humans ambushing him from the Church.
‘page of collaboration: text with tongue, distress, longing’
In The Remnants of Auschwitz Agamben delineates that which eludes being captured by words: the trauma of annihilation.
In The Unspeakable Girl Agamben’s exploration of the Eleusinian Mystery rites appears to present an alternative understanding of Persephone’s trauma as being one that leads to an experience of ecstatic re-birth. The essence of this experience refuses colonisation or interpretation, is not restricted to an elite or retained for the select, but is open to all. It cannot be transmitted or described; it can only be experienced in the body. The Kore, the young girl, the essence of vital life, is re-born from the trauma. This is Wolf Alice. This is also Little Kate being brought back to an enlivened beingness through the tiny ink drawings and the paintings.
‘Finding Little Kate’ suspended, momentarily
The paintings in this exhibition of the Unspeakable are like still-shot images from a renaissance of life out of the trauma of the once lost. They pulse with life caught momentarily in an eternal present, balanced between an impossibly uncertain past and a tremulously reached-for future.
In another small book published with the title Ninfe three years before The Unspeakable Girl, Agamben quotes Walter Benjamin’s note that the ‘image is that wherein what has been comes together in a flash with the now (jetzt) to form a constellation […] a threshold between immobility and movement.’ (Agamben 2007 p26)
Ninfe, published in translation under the title Nymphs in 2011, appears to track the spoor of the moment of coming into being as it has threaded its way through the work of artists and philosophers through the Renaissance from the Medieval to the Modern. There are instances of suspension at which this moment of coming into being can be witnessed or experienced; and these instances are unspeakable and not unconnected to trauma.
Agamben’s work makes the case that it is precisely and only in these instances of suspension that the image itself can come into being, can come to life, being rescued from what he quotes Benjamin as describing as merely ‘alienated things’ that have been ‘hollowed out’ (Agamben 2007 p28). He is making a subtle but crucial point: hollowed out alienated things are not images, they are signs emptied of all meaning, where ‘meaning’ appears as the opposite of death.
‘Angel with child (self-portrait)’: The nymph begins to acquire her soul
In Kate Walters’ work presented in this exhibition we see these images being nursed into being out of the inchoate uncertainties of her own traumatic experience which is both hers and that of all of us who, confronted with the shock of the not-understood, continue struggling towards awareness, continue pushing and being pulled towards the sun.
‘Rasa watercolour’ ‘Hiding in a wall’
As we can see in the texture and gesture of line, colour and medium, embodiment of ink or oil pigment, these moments of suspension are both powerful and fragile, constantly eluding us and on the point of disappearing. Agamben quotes Benjamin: ‘images are constellated between alienated things and incoming and disappearing meanings – are instantiated in the moment of indifference between death and meaning’ (Agamben 2007 p29). As Agamben says ‘the dialectical image holds its object suspended in a semantic void’ (Agamben 2007 p29/30).
‘Creatureliness and dreaming of you’
Our experience in that ‘semantic void’ is to witness and to have testimony of that moment impressed upon us primarily in, not through, our body’s senses. These works are themselves unspeakable because they have to be understood in the moment of being that is held in the body. They are also moments in which seeing the Medusa becomes revelatory rather than deathly.
Little Kate, as she comes into view through the ink spilling itself over the typed words of little books, brings with her something from her past and ours that gets reworked in the very act of her formation and this process of vitalization, of renaissance, appears almost epiphanic. It is for this that Little Kate is also Kore, Persephone, kissing the flower thrusting into her whole face, overwhelmed by her own sex and so vulnerable to being captured and exploited by the male gaze of patriarchal power and having to find an Eleusinian way to resist.
Persephone’s story comes to us through the Homeric poem called the ‘Hymn to Demeter’. The Hymn was an oral performance which conveyed what had happened to those listening so they would share in the experience and bear witness to its effects. Agamben quotes Albert Lord on Homeric poems: ‘an oral poem is not composed for but in performance’ (Agamben 2007 p13/14). He links this to Aby Warburg’s theory of Pathosformeln in that they too ‘are hybrids of matter and form, of creation and performance, of first-timeness (primovoltita) and repetition.’ (Agamben 2007 p14) Each repetition with which the image is brought to life, is an instance of first-timeness, because it takes place in the performative space between the work and the witness.
‘Kissing the Angel’
Aby Warburg’s theory of Pathosformeln traces the persistent and elusive appearance in pictorial art of the formulated range of gestural instances of passion. One of which, the nymph, is the subject of the 46th plate of Mnemosyne Atlas. None of the nymphs depicted in plate 46 can be considered the ‘original’ and none of them are ‘copies’, each nymph, Agamben writes, ‘is an indiscernible blend of originariness and repetition, of form and matter’ and so is ‘a being whose form punctually coincides with its matter and whose origin is indissoluble from its becoming’ and that a being such as this ‘is what we call time’. ‘Pathosformeln are made of time – they are crystals of historical memory, crystals which are ‘phantasmatized’ (in Domenico’s sense) and round which time writes its choreography.’ (Agamben 2007 p15)
Through the concentrated devotion that enables an opening of the imagination, the ‘hollowed out’ ‘alienated things’ are drawn up by an artist like Kate Walters out of the swirling memorial past into a momentary suspension on the canvas (or page) where they are infilled with the beingness of images that have ‘charged themselves with time almost to the point of exploding’ (Agamben 2007 p4), creating the threshold between immobility and movement.
‘Girl with spirit animals breathing…’ ‘into her crown’
In Warburg’s description of the nymph as also ‘an elemental spirit (Elementargeist), a pagan goddess in exile’ (Agamben 2007 p39) Agamben recognises a reference to Paracelsus’ essay ‘De nymphis, sylphis, pygmies et salamandris et caeteris spiritibus’ which explores the nature of a creature of the spirit. All of these have bodies, like animals, and can reason, like humans, but because they are also of a spirit nature they do not have souls. However, the nymph can acquire a soul by copulating with a man, and any children she might bear will also have souls (Agamben 2007 p 45).
‘I meet my Angel Out Ahead’ ‘Beatrice in Paradiso’
Agamben describes these elemental spirits as constituting ‘the ideal archetype of every separation of man from himself’ (Agamben 2007 p44). If we interpret ‘man’ and ‘himself’ as being an indeterminate gender term, we might see that the joining of the nymph with the body of the artist, and with the body of the witness, is the process by which this separation is healed. Furthermore, it is a re-enactment of the epiphanic moment that renews itself into an originary experience each time we look at one of the paintings in this exhibition of Kate Walters.
‘Third eye, third mouth. Tiny drawing in a book’
Agamben writes with reference to Averroes (aka Ibn Rushd) that ‘imagination delineates a space in which we are not yet thinking, in which thought becomes possible through an impossibility to think’ (Agamben 2007 p55-6), and that thinking is made possible by uniting (copulating) with the phantasms/images of imagination and memory, ‘which are the ultimate constituents of the human and the only avenues to its possible rescue’ (Agamben 2007 p56).
The image suspended and charged with time requires an experiential union within the poetic and imaginal body of the artist and thereafter of the witness. This is the place where meaning comes into being, where soul is made and where psychic reality is enabled to emerge. The psychic reality of who each one of us experiences ourselves to be, the collective psychic reality of our daily cultural experience, is formed by this unfolding process.
On February 24th 2023 my solo exhibition reflecting on my own and others’ experiences of trauma will open. It will feature works from the past 12 years or so, comprising watercolours, oil paintings, and works in found books as well as tiny loose drawings exploring dream imagery around trauma, loss, love, desire and longing. Some of these works have been made after and during periods of psychoanalysis. Themes of protection and descent will be explored, and an acknowledgment that we can gain great riches if we have the courage, wherewithal and support necessary to dive into the areas of ourselves which might be buried alive, frozen, grieving or wounded.
There will be short passages of writing to support the exhibition.
Here is an extract: Trauma is being without the ability to protect yourself (you are vulnerable to predators). You allow a man you know only slightly (but have reservations about) into your home at night. He brings cans of special brew with him and you don’t know that’s a red flag. Your father didn’t teach you how to protect yourself. The young man with the beer tells you you’re beautiful before he says he’ll kill you if you don’t make him some tea. You freeze in terror, your dogs do nothing. You think of your young son upstairs in bed. You make tea for the man. You wait in agony placating him and when he’s drunk his tea you somehow get him out of the house (I don’t remember how) then you dial 999 and they come with a big van and they take him away. He makes a lot of noise when they catch him outside my house. The neighbours do nothing, say nothing.
Trauma can be loving someone who doesn’t love you in return. It’s loving when it’s hopeless, it’s loving when he hurts you over and over again, it’s loving the man who must in some way be like your father, that man whose love you needed and wanted but never received.
He’s the man who writes to you and tells you the passion, the charge between you, will never be enacted. You cry in your Venetian hotel room, soft and silent tears. Your grown son is with you, he hears your silent crying and sits up, soothing you, and telling you what you know. In the night I think he’s an angel when he brushes my arm with the lightest of touches.
Here are links to the workshop on March 18th, which will begin with a short talk on the exhibition.
https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/artists-and-the-inner-child-workshop-with-kate-walters-tickets-515581888307?aff=ebdsoporgprofile
At the Venice Biennale last month the first pavilion I entered was the Belgian one, this year represented by Francis Alys. I looked in the catalogue which was a facsimile of his sketchbook. In it I saw a horse standing over a reclining figure. I was reminded of my times with my horse all the days when she would stand over me as I lay curled upon her floor like hair or straw or air. (And then when I saw the photos I took on Iona on the beach holding the 360 degree camera over my head but it caught my hair laying like some strange grass or weed washed up by the sea or erupting; a strange wave of hair out of the sand).
Reading a new book in bed about dreams and Leonora Carrington I discover that she too had a close connection with horses, and one in particular from her youth: like me. We were both carried as we grew from girls into women, carried on the backs of horses.
Horse’s tongue mothering me, washing and grooming my back, my neck. How I need and needed to feel this.
Art saves. It allows for the expression of what is unconscious and what could damage our bodies. It gives holy expression to our pain and transforms.
Fathers and Animals
I’m beginning to see, thanks to my new painting, that my new father might be half animal and half man. Little Kate will be happy with this I think. She thinks about being washed by a mothers tongue like animals do. I need more Scala Pink.
Descent
I dream of watching a whale’s fin rise in the water, swim for a while, then regularly and rhythmically descend beneath the eaves. My shamanic teacher is beside me. I waken and think about the shamanic work and the dream is telling me to ask it to be with me in my work on descending.
Dream, early December
A fragment. Of a tiny hole in a wall of bricks/rubble/partial plaster( as in Italy) and the small square hole has tiny pieces of rubble and sticks in it which I had to take out. I had to go through this hole to descend to a dark place beneath. I did manage to energetically get through he hole by shape-shifting. I’m reminded of a dream from a couple of years ago, in which I had a needle stuck in my throat, and I asked the man in my life (then) to take it out for me. He was unable to accomplish it. So I did it myself, with a mirror. In the end it was not difficult, it didn’t hurt, and there was no blood.
Solstice
As I drummed I saw my body full of flames, many little fires all over my body, all burning sweetly, steadily, quietly. I was told to let go of anything which distorts the flames, suppresses them or causes them to burn in a distorted or distorting way. There is a connection between the fire, flames, and music which I don’t understand yet. It’s to do with the way things grow when there is harmony; an elegance and an ease in the development of form.
In the meditation around the chakras it became clear that traces of energies which are no longer ours or which don’t belong to us or help us can be released and visualized as tiny energetic petals falling away to dust.
In my own meditation on the crown/headdress and the drawing I can now see how closely it resembles a tree and how far down the energetic roots grow. I was told I need to manifest all I’m given spiritually, and to work with an energetic staff. Having a holy appendage. Crowning different parts of the body. Maybe the breasts, belly, sexual area. Draw this…
Notes from the end of the blue notebook
Gabor Mate p 133 The Myth of Normal.
“Since emotion is the engine of maturation, when children lose their tender feelings, they become stuck in their immaturity.”
“The child’s expression of feelings cannot threaten the attachment relationship with the parents.”
“We have instilled in her the anxiety of being rejected if her emotional self were to surface.”
“By banishing feelings from awareness, we merely send them underground, a locked cellar of emotions, that will continue to haunt many lives.”
You’re shielded from grief but need joy to discover this.
Free play 1:1, agenda free vital for the development of neocortex engaging joy and imagination.
….
More notes
Dream on 22.12.22 about Heaven coming down into the body. Like a V or birds wings appearing to break the body in half and yet not…the Heavenly energy does not break the body, it imprints itself on the body precisely as bird’s wings, flight, might do. Or it opens a space within the cells of the body to know the vibration of Heaven within the body. This was the sense of the dream. Then I was ill, so had plenty of time to reflect on this.
In September 2022 I was sitting quietly in my studio feeling vaguely agitated about something when an idea about creating and doing something positive to raise money and awareness entered the top of my head like a wedge. It wouldn’t go away.
I was waiting to see some visitors to my studio; they were bringing their daughter, who is studying at Oxford University, to see my work.
By the time my visitors arrived, I had decided to move ahead with my idea. Indeed, it wouldn’t let go of me until I made that decision.
I told my visitors about my plan, and they became the first to offer a contribution – which was: their daughter, Dulcie Havers would give a talk about her scientific research during the exhibition. (This proved to be fascinating at the event). They also promised to tell their friends… I realized early on that one of the key factors would be getting enough people to come along to buy and give their attention and energy to the event.
The next thing I did was to contact Tom at Tremenheere gallery, and Neil and Jane who own it, to ask for their permission. This was given, cheerfully, then Tom and I met to discuss dates.
I started to tell people, and to ask people to donate work or time or a skill. I became brazen about asking! Something I never could have done some years ago.
I used my network and contacted many people asking them to give talks. One early contact was with Anne-Marie Solowij, ex-Vogue journalist and driver of mini-buses to Ukraine with food and supplies for people still there, and to offer safe passage for those wishing to leave. She told me her own father had been a refugee from Ukraine many years ago. She promised to give an illustrated talk (clips are on my instagram feed).
One of my preoccupying thoughts was about which charities we should support. For various reasons I had given up on mainstream media, and I’d become a keyboard warrior and follower of many charities, scientists, researchers, advocates and activists on Twitter. Through my connections on this platform I learned about the work of several charities and situations of great need which helped me to make decisions about who we should support. As a shamanic practitioner and artist I’m keenly aware of the inter-relatedness of all living beings, so I felt clear that Extinction Rebellion should be supported; in fact it was Ocean Rebellion who came as well as representatives from XR to talk about their work and to show us the horrors – and implications – of the assaults on living systems in the oceans.
In the late summer of 2022 the flooding due to the climate catastrophe was severe in Pakistan so I felt we should support the Disasters Emergency Committee who always help in situations of dire need. Many yeas ago I was part of a team which created a fund-raising show for Freedom from Torture; it felt imperative that we support them again. We had a great speaker -Ian Pye – from the organization too (clips on Instagram).
Sometime earlier in the summer I found a fascinating essay on Twitter about the climate catastrophe and the need for us to begin to embrace catastrophic language – it being the only appropriate one for what is coming towards us, fast – by an academic in the US called Susan Kassouf. This essay helped me to hone my thinking around this topic – I was also beginning to turn my thoughts at the same time to an exhibition I have coming soon which opens on February 24th 2023 at Studio Kind in Devon – about Trauma. Catastrophe and Trauma and the ways we have of thinking about them tend to be ignored, swept under the carpet, shamed, or belittled. I wanted to find a strong (and also vulnerable) way of being with our thoughts and feelings about what is going on in the world. Rates of change are fast and demanding us to be adaptable and wide awake.
In October I taught my usual workshop on Iona, and to my great relief a number of my most passionate and dependable students offered to help run the event. Their help proved invaluable; I couldn’t have done it without them. Other current and ex-students offered to help in so many ways….
Throughout November the pressure built and works started to arrive from all over the UK. I carried on asking. A tiny few said ‘no’. It was a big ask: requesting work from artists who would get nothing in return. A very few people were put off by the mention of XR. Finding an auctioneer was hard; in the end I asked Jesse Leroy Smith who did a wonderful job and gave a stirring speech too….
I began to lose sleep feeling the pressure. I posted almost daily on various platforms to encourage contributions and footfall. I had other work to do at the same time including teaching so it all felt like a lot to carry. Then it was the handing-in day and I arrived late, after delegating. I was out and about in my car collecting work and plants and books for the event. Angela Cockayne provided copies of her new book, and plants she’s raised for us to sell. My car was full!
Newlyn Art School, Tanya Krzywinska, Penny Florence and Falmouth University helped by lending us IT equipment for the film screenings and talks.
I had around 30 emails or messages to respond to daily about various logistical arrangements for the event. I felt pretty overwhelmed. But it was great to see so much work coming in and such a wide variety. Larger pieces were particularly welcome – thank you Sophie and Charlotte!
Then it was the evening and time for me and Jesse to complete the placing. Marie-Claire Hamon and I had already had a first attempt at making some kind of order/beauty from our generous submissions.
Jesse offered a fresh eye and before long it all made sense.
The following morning Dan Pyne, Andrew Swann, Una D’Aragona and Karen Lorenz began to install. They did an amazing job. We had to do it all in one day. It was tough. Other people helped with labels and running things around.
The following day on December 2nd we opened at 11 am and the visitors began to arrive.
Dulcie Havers and her friend fellow Oxford student Jamie Walker gave powerful readings about the scientific perspective on climate change. Delpha Hadson came and entertained us with her light touch and her gorgeous music….
We had a powerful and slightly frightening performance piece about refugees by Ilker Cinarel and Penny Florence on Friday evening; after that my favourite part which was a shamanic ceremony to bring in blessings and prayers for the whole event. Photographer Alban Roinard came along and took great photos of the Friday evening’s events – free of charge….
On Saturday the visitor numbers grew and we started to make considerable numbers of sales. It was so heartening.
Readings and talks followed, by Ian Pye, Anne-Marie Solowij, Katrina Naomi, Sophie Miller, Ben Ross and Neil Scott. They were all powerful and moving. There are clips on my Instagram feed.
Kathy Wray spent two days making portrait drawings of visitors for a small fee, and she performed a dance too, moving us all away from words….
At 5 pm Jesse arrived and shortly after he gave a profound and hilarious speech urging us all to win our heart’s desire by buying them a piece of art…fortunately there were several couples where love bestowed generosity upon their hearts; and high bids. It was great.
By around 6.30 pm it was all over and then the big task of counting and checking began.
And the tidying up!
Most of us were extremely tired but we had to leave the gallery in good order so our cold Sunday morning was spent making good the walls and wrapping and packing unsold works – many of which are still at my home waiting for possibly another event to be run next time by a larger team in another part of Cornwall….
My sincere and unending thanks to all who helped in so many ways.
But especially to Nikki Kenna, Sally Tripptree and Karen Lorenz.
Photos and clips on my Instagram feed:
https://www.instagram.com/katewaltersartist/
Photo by kind permission of Hana Shahnavaz, taken at Arusha Gallery on the opening night of my solo show in June 2022
Kate Walters: No Ordinary Woman
Painter, poet, shaman, writer and tutor.
Kate Walters ‘Love Paintings’ – featuring lovers, angels, spirit animals, organs and shamanic embodiments ablaze with emotion – are currently on a one-man show at the Arusha Gallery in Edinburgh til July 24th. Raw, delicate and primordial, Walters’ pictures wield love and sexuality in glowing colour and form. The exhibition seems an aching invitation for us all to remember something long forgotten… deeply buried.
The love and longing pouring out of the figures is almost uncomfortably intimate for the modern viewer – and yet endearing and relatable, which draws us in. What gives Walters the courage of her convictions that each of her pictures – which surely parade vulnerability as a true strength – has something worth saying?
“Experience, practice. Listening to my paintings and the accounts and feedback of others on experiencing them. A sense of completeness when I spend time with them. Knowing their history, what they’ve been through to come to the point of completion. It’s never simple or easy or a short journey: each picture has a huge history lying like a curled sleeping snake behind it. When writers write about my work it helps me to have confidence in what the pictures are saying, and that they can speak to many.”
As well as artist, writer and teacher, Walters is a classically trained shaman. With the door to a spirit world openable through shamanic ritual, and with so many influences to choose from both human and spiritual, I wonder how Walters renders her choice of images down to form a sense of cohesion to her body of work?
“The roots for this body of work are intense penetration of certain themes and obsessions of mine – the symbolic imagination, myths, mysticism, poetic language, various religious traditions. For example Sufi mysticism and the writings which explore it, such as those by Tom Cheetham and Henry Corbin. There is also the joy of paint itself and the magic which happens when you allow it to help you find the true voice of your creative imagination.
“Then, at certain points in a family of paintings, I do step back and look at how they are relating to each other, but if one’s path is strong their relation to each other will not be forced or managed, it will happen without design, having its own mysterious blueprint. Cohesion grows and develops naturally, as a tree might grow a strong crown from deep and well-watered roots.
How does someone like Walters – whose accent firmly places her own roots in or around London – come to be working as an artist and shaman in Penwith?
“I began my life as an artist around 35 years ago, soon after my son was born. I’d been to art school (Brighton) 10 years previously and apart from working in sketchbooks, a little writing and photography, I’d run a farm and didn’t have the energy for making art back then. But when my son was born and I had a difficult time in my personal life, I began to have intense dreams and the need to express myself creatively grew powerfully. A few years later I went part-time in my art-teaching career and began an MA at Falmouth university. Soon after I moved to Cornwall and began to develop my own practice in a dedicated way, on very little money and as a single parent.”
We all know how finding the time to make and create art can be difficult, especially while working, raising a child and fitting into a new community. And building self-confidence can take a lifetime. How long has it taken Walters to create – and have confidence in – her own artistic language?
“I’ve had three or perhaps four main phases of artistic language… they’ve evolved gradually in most cases, each one leading naturally to the next in a way which I didn’t feel I was directing. When I first moved to Penzance in 1997 I worked in oil painting and drawing, responding to this wild landscape for a few years. I was writing then too and dreaming – my emotional life fragile – and this was reflected in the paintings and drawings which sought to explore and understand my inner life. Gradually the explorations of my psyche and various traumatic events came to meet the surface where my hands encountered the paper, and the confidence to express these impulses slowly grew and
accumulated. Each time a new language emerges it feels like a surprise, yet it is also known and always welcomed.”
Kate Walters is a striking figure with long silver hair, a strong self-contained presence, and a great pair of knee-high pink suede boots. She has lived a big life so far, and her presence makes a confident statement. What does she favour about Newlyn School of Art?
“It has a wide range of practising artists and tutors who are very experienced. I’ve taught in a lot of places and there’s no substitute for experience – it counts for a lot. And it’s very practical and hands-on compared to other art schools. Newlyn uses a lot of traditional materials like gesso, and ink made from plant pigments, which have gone out of use but which contemporary artists are coming back to and I’m all for.”
A recent Newlyn student myself I am always hungry for advice from tutors about how to get better, to get more in depth into my work, to feel and think like an artist. Walters’ sense of self seems so strong, and her knowledge profound. What rich sources does she draw from to inform and consolidate and suggest future works?
“I read very widely (books on psychoanalysis, other artists, traditions and writers such as Georgianna Houghton, Maria Lassnig, Louise Bourgeois, James Hillman, erotic art, Persian miniatures, Helene Cixous, Anne Carson, Tantra, etc) and this has helped to give me a feeling of context, to enjoy the company of fellow travellers, even though they may be long dead or far away. Something is shared which gives me a feeling of belonging, especially needed when the areas I’m exploring are fleeting, wispy, fugitive, subtle, elusive, tender, afraid.”
“When I’m painting I’ll jot down words or phrases which come, or places of understanding I’m taken to through the process of painting. Tiny drawings sparked by what’s happening in the painting will also arrive; and sometimes I’ll make another painting from a particular phase in a painting which I know will soon be subsumed by another development. These words might become titles, or they might grow into the poems I write alongside my painting practice. And sometimes the most overlooked areas of one’s practice… the shadow… bears the most riches.”
w/c 1099
Links to essays: https://www.arushagallery.com/usr/documents/press/download_url/182/kate-walters-essay-joseph-suart.pdf
Drawing Near is an exhibition, fund-raising event and awareness raising time which will be held at Tremenheere Gallery – by generous permission of Neil Armstrong and Jane Martin. Tom Heale, the gallery manager will be managing sales and overseeing much of the organisation – thank you Tom!
Tremenheere Gallery is just outside Penzance.
The idea for the event came to me one afternoon when I was sitting in my studio thinking about Ukraine, the floods in Pakistan, and the climate emergency, species extinction, and refugees. For many months I have been running a prayer circle for the people of Ukraine, with friends who work with me for healing and restoration.
Around 10 years ago I initiated an event to raise funds for Freedom from Torture which was held at Anima Mundi, by kind permission of Joseph Clarke.
This time we are hoping to support more charities, to include Freedom from Torture, Disasters Emergency Committee, Eden Aid, medecins sans frontieres, Sea Shepherd and XR.
We are inviting artists to donate works, and to deliver on November 30th to the gallery between 11am and 3 pm. All funds raised will go the charities named.
I will place the works that evening with the help of Jesse LeRoy Smith. The next day, December 1st, a great team is assembled to install the exhibition, which will include works by the great painters Richard Cook, Marie-Claire Hamon, Louise McClary, Naomi Frears, Andy Harper, Rachael Reeves, Gareth Edwards, ceramics by Linda Styles and Jesse Selkin, prints by Paul Bloomer, Anita Reynolds and others, works by Jesse Smith, Dan Pyne, Charlotte Turner, Sally Tripptree, Yolande Armstrong, Una D’Aragona, Tanya Krzywinska, and many others including me.
There will also be events such as a poetry reading by Katrina Naomi, meditations, shamanic ceremony, an auction, essays and other readings. There will also be a talk by a lorry driver who takes supplies to Ukraine and returns with refugees.
The event begins on December 2nd at 11am. There will be events all day on the 2nd, finishing that evening with a shamanic ceremony for healing at 6 pm. On the 3rd we will be open from 11am with further events and sales, finishing with an auction at 2.15 pm and closing the doors at 5pm that day.
There is ample free parking. We are hoping for lots of interested people and buyers to help support this event, all the people who will benefit, and all the artists who have been so generous with their time and works.
Below are some responses and some of my teaching notes…. The Blue Mares Anoint the Earth
From the velvet of the universe they come, their ears flat to the horse behind, manes rearing and tails soaring. They come climbing the curvature of the earth, draw half-light from dark matter, dark from the stars. Their hooves grip the mantle, splay gases, ozone, argon, tremble the watery biosphere. They come to anoint, to pour the pink and the grey over us to settle on typhoon and tempest, forest fire, eruption, the flooded marshlands. On and on they canter, their necks jostle, their nostrils breathe the gold of gods, the incense of the heavens. They gallop in circles around and around each plane of sphere, blue flanks wet with sweat and their breath silver. The grey and the white and the dark light fall over the earth oiling, oiling, oiling, till the mare’s bodies become bones and their hair falls to be woven with the paws of bear, lion, wolf.
By Nikki Kenna, Iona, 2022.
I had a wonderful time with you and the beautiful group of women we shared our week with. The work we did was deep and powerful and so part of the Iona landscape with its machair and sea, curlews, Barnacle geese flying and the golden eagle coming to close our workshop. My Hollow Bone session with you took me to such a connected place and I am still drawing on the blessings and power I felt. My practice has new purpose and I feel that I have a well to dip for my work and life.
Thank you , Kate x Nikki Kenna.
The night walk was very special. The silence between us, the open sky, the setting sun, the luminous sand, the softness of it all, the curlew call, the fullsome moon. The ease, freedom and trust I felt walking in the almost-darkness with the group. I couldn’t have done it without them.
This gentle island holds us as if in a prayer, the merest whisper, delicate and strong as a web.
Maggie
This is my third workshop on Iona with Kate Walters Artist … this five day work shop took me to the metaphysical , elemental edges far beyond what we can sense with our senses . Kate Walters, through her teaching and her ancient response to being, took me to a space that enabled the depths of my humanness to visually access fragile veils of strange, wonderous, uncomfortable, cellular spaces, where my work took me to places of unimaginable possibilities and beauty. Thank you for the unforgettable experience.
Sally
“I am still roaming pink beaches; running with wild spirit horses; walking snakelike, joined by an indelible golden thread; honouring my parents in wild and holy places… deep recalibration, connections and reconnections still forming…
Thank you, Kate, for the generosity and intuitive wisdom with which you created this incredible space; and for the loving and scrupulous way in which you held us there…and for making possible all the laughter, beauty, spirituality, creativity and deep companionship of this precious time.”
Val
It was a real privilege to spend a week on Iona with Kate and the group. The gentle spirit of this ‘thin’ place, its emptiness and beauty seemed to allow a deep opening, to Kate’s teaching and the shamanic practice. This and the generous sharing of everyone in the group led to the unfolding of a rich, powerful and profound experience – utterly wonderful!
I return home with a wealth of creative material to work on and the cours and forms of the island indelibly etched into my imaginative world.
In response to a shamanic journey:
Awaiting some unknown fate
Like being sacrificed;
Flesh against stone, spread wide
All I can do is give in to this
There is no question –
It is far greater even than the human heart.
A dark creature approaches
With an iron strength
Pounds at me without restraint
Over and over with such fierce power.
I am broken apart.
Wild primeval sounds streams from my mouth, from the very depths of me,
Echoing through lifetimes.
From between my legs the beast draws out a shining metallic river,
Pulling and pulling as if a child were being born
But instead, this endless golden flow
Pours richly into the earth,
A mysterious anointing.
With love and gratitude,
Maggy xx
………………..
North Beach Iona.
You are in the perfect place, chosen before time.
Find the rock where you feel rooted, stand there and
let what needs to happen, happen.
I have my own geometric design.
This will hold the power which flows through me.
I will charge up; I will fill up; and as I do
So I will clear my body lines and the lines
Which pass through the earth in this very spot.
I am a key, a powerful transformer
I will lay down a foundation for others to stand on.
Holding a small broken whelk shell in my left hand.
Tiny house furnished in pearly pink.
No one lives there any more.
A meal for a hungry, sharp-eyed bird.
There’s a hole in the roof where the water gets in
And in a thousand years I will feel you between my toes.
Its hard to imagine the restorative power of the combination of Kate Walters’s 5 day course and the Island of Iona to be found anywhere else on this planet.
She harnesses the creative authority found in the wind, the sand, the sea and the ever changing sky and brings all these strands together, weaving them into the rich mixture of her shamanic practise and her own very original teaching style.
It brings us back to this mystic place year after year to fill up our artistic coffers and we leave with enough imaginative material until the next time.
X MA Here are extracts from my teaching notes:
Welcome, introductions, confidentiality, hopes and intentions. Calling in song. St Columba. Thin place.
My broad brush hopes and intentions regarding general approach and picture regarding vibrations, energy.
Hollow bone. One early evening shamanic walk.
9.30 meditation. Walk to beach together mindfully, shamanically. Prayers there. Laying on our backs and fronts and tuning in, drawing with both hands onto sketch books as we lay quietly. Shamanic walk back. 11.00 Second journey to ask for guidance on each person’s main intentions and direction. Notes and drawings about this.
11.45 body=animal=vision guided meditation and drawing with closed eyes and left hand. Drawing to music to loosen up and have fun.
How can we find peace in ourselves? Journey and to ask also what can we do to help the world as well as ourselves ? The unending flame, the birds of spirit nesting here and the parents feeding the many young (all blue) esp the female. And the spirit flame has a kind of perfume.
Journey to ask what is your spirit perfume and does it connect you to a stone, a mineral you might find here, and or a plant being?, the birds here…birds in stories and myth – conference of the birds Persian books and images…where do the spirit birds nest in your body? Birds as messengers. Avian flu. Drawings and journey, a poem?
What does your angel look like? Where will you meet it? What does it have to say to you? A message? Draw it with non dom hand and closed eyes and delicate marks. Journey and drawing afterwards. Follow up from yesterday. Angel out ahead coming backwards to meet us as we go forwards.
Music, breath, marks, drawing, words tuning into parts of your body.
Iona the island of the horses, horses swimming across great waters. Meditate briefly on this image and what it brings up in you. Epona often associated with Demeter and with birds and rivers. My dream of the horse and rivers…
What is the magical seed you would eat? Where would it come from, what would it look like, would it be coated in anything e.g. gold, rose perfume? Meditation then shamanic journey. P 154
What or who is your divine partner to be with you, inspire you, in this life? Journey. Drawings, paintings.
write a love letter to your mother, your work, this place; and from all of the above to yourself…
What or who would your hair and bones be energetically woven into for safety? High energy, animal, plant or spirit… meditation then journey…and drawing with non dom hand and closed eyes
3.30 Where do you feel you need anointing? How would it happen and who would do it? How would you anoint the world to help ease the path of peace? And climate change? The coming catastrophe, do we have language for it? Is it body language, animal language? Read parts of Susan Kassouf essay and feel into words around trauma, also the XR texts and dark mountain, uncivilisation. Draw, write, feel pockets of trauma in our bodies.
What are the moments of transition (Sovatsky book) towards intimacies – the mystery of trust and desire. Stoking your inner fire, how would you be held?
Turn to Emil Nolde …. Notes on colour. Strong harmonies to be held inside. The pale spiritual harmonic blend of the Iona palette. Work with both.
What is your inner palette? A journey to ask to be shown the colours, then work with them and allow the creative process, the hands-on with paint, to take the process further, to extend or complete the journey. Allowing the spirits to work through your hands in the creative act, not just in the shamanic journey.
“The pulse of strong colours and the way they intensified the timbre and increased the volume of ‘sound’ emanating from each colour was what gave his art the power to delight – and shock – us to this day. “ we are reminded that life is extraordinary – knowing how to look, and be receptive… He worked in layers, he soaked the paper to remove the size so it was more absorbent. Layers of oils with glazes give you more intense colours, like my blacks in my recent cave painting.
Nolde had an early formative experience of laying down on the earth like Christ with his arms open then rolling over and feeling the whole earth was his lover/beloved… brought the spiritual, bodily, powerful erotic aspect to his work. Group to try this also, to make drawings, to feel it intensely, let colours bubble up in their consciousness and to enjoy them, feel the joy in them, the effervescence. What are the special qualities in this particular (northern) landscape you could bring into your work to help you with your art and your soul? Be aware, tune your awareness to the rarefied aspects of this place, the sounds, the colours, the whisperings…
Nolde told his friends that the best art was often difficult to appreciate on first viewing. Why do you think this might be true?
Nolde moved from an optical, external stimulus to a deeply felt inner value. “Nolde was in the vanguard of those German artists who wanted to create a spiritually charged art.”
What and where is the navel or omphalos of your work/self? What is your umbilicus connected to? What nourishes you, comes through that cord? Do you need to disconnect from anything? Where does your holy milk pour from?
Becoming not broken but broken open. What in you needs healing, and what needs to break open? A journey, some drawings afterwards.
“Catastrophe – an over-turning. “Developing our ability to think catastrophic thoughts may allow us to make contact with those evolving realities thus enabling us to translate thought into much needed action and make change in the world.”
“A traumatised sensibility has learned from experience that annihilation is thinkable. It can bear the tragic, this feeling of irreparable brokenness, or, in environmental terms, that we have entered a time of post-sustainability.” The world is not assumed to be safe. Just as annihilation is thinkable, despair is bearable. We are learning to mourn losses on an unprecedented scale. You can lead with your vulnerability. Vulnerability does not mean weakness.
“Instead of hardening and splitting, we can soften and open, allowing ourselves to weather, to experience how microclimates are embedded in a larger world.”
“A traumatised sensibility acknowledges living in a material body, a body that is not one’s own, a body subject to wounding, to degradation, to weathering. I am porous and fragile, flammable, floodable, subject to infection. Stability is a thing of the past. Home may not be safe. Care-givers may not know what they are doing.” from Susan Kassouf
What part of your body will fall away with all your tears? Where could your body collapse? From a dream of mine.
Where does the earth creep into you? Where are your boundaries with the earth soft and porous? Tune into your body and draw.
I recently returned from my workshop in Devon on finding our own unique mystic paths. This was a four day workshop; I think four days is a good length of time in which to dive deep into our own creative and psychological processes. I always hold the space kindly, gently, warmly, and with humour. Drumming in the yurt, Devon.
Notes from my Lesson Plan…
11 am yurt
Welcome, few mins each on what has drawn them to this course and what their hopes are. Smudging and why. Altar, objects, bringing someone in energetically. My approach – high energy, high vibration, tuning to the highest power and source. Intro to shamanic journeying. Protective meditation.
Lunch
Power animal journey. Meeting or reacquaintance. Notes and drawings.
Second and third journey to ask about mystic paths in our lives and in our bodies. How do they look? Are they shining? Where are they taking us? Why do we need them? How do mystic paths come into our lives, our bodies? Think about occasions in your life when they might have appeared/you might have felt them…draw and write from this…tuning into your body as you do this…and asking to see the internal paths, the whisperings from our organs, the vagus nerve. Draw and write about both. Books.
Tuesday 9.30 am meet outside yurt with glass of water. Meditation to cleanse and energise chakras with sun and water.
How are we distracted from our life work? Why are we here on earth, what do we have to give to others, to realise in ourselves? Life path. Coffee break. 11.30.
Fourth journey to ask about the angel out ahead, read from Corbin relevant paragraphs, after some talking about this. How the angel comes backwards to meet us, and we meet by going forwards towards it (genderless).
Find spirit guide first. Journey.
Spirit guide journey to ask about this. Drawings and writing.
Hugging in silence and stillness; tuning in; and drawing any images which arrive.
Assignment for the afternoon:
Time spent looking at the work of Tom Cheetham, Corbin and Halifax. Choose some phrases which are lit up for you, which ‘sing.’ Open pages at random.
Lunch and free time to draw, look at books
3.30pm The path of the visionary, the 5D world, the intertwining of the visionary and the everyday 3 D worlds. Shamanic journey using a text or phrase as a starting point – asking the journey to help us understand the writing at a higher level.
Dance perhaps or seaswim….
Wednesday
9.30 am meditation with water.
Pavilion
Time spent looking at iconic imagery perhaps Christian, Islamic, indigenous, (Arctic catalogue) and ask for pointers towards our own iconography – draw after and during shamanic journeys.
Lunch, time alone and with books, own work.
4pm Drawing and painting to music and read texts. Swim?
Thursday, meditation
Shamanic journey to ask how we can be a truthful beautiful high energy instrument. Draw and write about this and allow the creative process to be part of the refinement of the image or imagery which arrives for you.
What sounds would you make in the world? Who would play you? How would you be strung?
How would you purify and elevate your pitch? What do you need to do in your world to keep yourself tuned, vibrating? Write and draw about this, allow it to settle into you. Have a sense of it absorbing, being absorbed by your cells. So important to be tuned to the highest possible source and frequency. Make a journey to ask about this, and about how to bring more beauty into one’s own world.
Last afternoon
Summary of all we’ve achieved. Looking outwards to Ukraine and other traumatised areas; asking what we can do – a journey. Then a ceremony perhaps to send energy and healing.
Thinking about climate emergency, and how we deal with tuning into catastrophe. Read aloud some of that essay? Finding a language and a way to be with what is coming. Meditation and journey.
Protective meditation and circle, closing song etc..
Recent studio notes…
Backwards from Aug 22nd
Phallus breaching upwards growing like a tree, growing sideways towards her breasts.
When he thinks of me it’s as if something ‘locks on’ to my thoughts/being – its inescapable; doesn’t usually last very long…
I make two weak drawings of my dream. A phallus growing from the base of my tongue; or, my tongue branches into tongue and phallus, and the phallus grows upward to my crown, through my skull. Mouth as cathedral; kundalini awake. And somehow happening to S too; or she was there…
Using the paint in a luscious way and inspired by Auerbach, some landscapes, flowers, giving a voice to Nature, and the woman with the horse, queen with stallion.
20.08.22
A pure vessel allows pure spirit through to shine. No impediment or altering of spirit’s voice.
With the heart-light in his breath.
16.8.22
Dream of a house stripped down to bricks, like you find in Venice or Italy; 4-square and strong, brick with layers of plaster/render stripped off, standing alone in the ground, felt it was Italy. A few other people came and went, including a man I was a bit afraid of. It has many windows.
She collects water from her body. KARA fish shoo away bad energy. Saying sorry to water. Hana. The tree of all seeds in the vast body of the waters.
15.8.22
The man swims up through my body, to kiss the inside of my mouth, and the lower part of my brain.
She learns to hear the lost speech.
The soothing of and for the male.
‘To be successful in the arts is not a matter of summarizing’ Delacroix wrote, but of amplifying where it is possible, and of prolonging the sensation by every means. P 6 Auerbach catalogue Venice biennale 1985.
Early Persian tree
Tree of all seeds – all in the whole world – in a heavenly ocean or on a sat-studded mountain – 10,000 seeds. Kind of healing plants – elixir –
Phoenix bird original pre Islam half dog half phoenix bird has peacock feathers, she’s a mother and a healer, strong and protective. She will give you a feather. She nests in the tree, she lands, her wings slap the branches, seeds are released into the ocean.
Another version – a male half dog half eagle sits under the tree, catches seeds, puts them up into rain clouds (twin is shadow side). Zoroastrian story – oral – saying sorry to water…
From Wikipedia:
Trees specially evergreens and ancient trees are the symbol of Immortals in Zoroastrianism. The link between trees, “Immortality and deathlessness” ameretát is established in the poetic gathas, See Yasna 51.7.
The original gathic poetry reads as follows: apas-čá ûrvarávs-čá ameretátá haûrvátá. Here the word for “tree” is ûrvar, and the word for “immortality, deathlessness” is ameretát.
Avestan ûrvará “tree” is a cognate of Latin arbor “tree.” Other cognates are Latin arvus “ploughed field,” and Mycenaean Greek aroura “arable land.”
Trees also come in close connection with “prophetic vision and oracles” in the Avestan poetry. The süd-kar gathic commentary of Yasna 31.5 narrates the vision of an immense tree with four branches, of gold, silver, steel, and “mixed-up” iron, which symbolize the four future ages of this world.
The “mixed-up” iron symbolizes the present age of admixture that is the calamitous age of invasion/contamination by demons.
An Avestan passage in Yasht/hymn 12/17, praises the tree of the great mythical “falcon or eagle” saæna that stands in the middle of the “wide-shored ocean” vôúrú-kašahæ.
The eagle/falcon tree is a wondrous evergreen that keeps away decrepitude and death. It is called all healing with good and potent medicine. The seeds of all medicinal plants are deposited on it.
Saæna “falcon, eagle,” of the Avesta, is the mythical bird of Persian Mythology Sīmorḡwho is said to perch every year on this sacred tree located in the middle of wide-shored ocean, to mix its seeds with pure waters, which Tištar (Three-star, Sirius) then rains down on all the 7 climes of the earth, thus causing the growth of all kind of healing plants.
The Avestan saæna, Persian Sīmorḡ is a cognate of Sanskrit śyená. The Russian word for “falcon” sókol is a borrowing from the same word in ancient Iranian.
In the Avestan Yašt/hymn 14.41 Vərəθraγna, the god being of VICTORY, wraps xᵛarnæ, “glory, good fortune,” round the house of the worshipper, in the same way that the great falcon/eagle Saæna, cover the great mountains like the clouds.
In Zoroastrian religious ceremonies, “small branches or twigs” of an evergreen (mostly cypress trees) or fruit tree (usually pomegranate) called barəsman, form an important part of the sacred ritual. Barəsman is derived from the root barəz “to grow high.” German berg“high” is a cognate.
Barəsman “sacred twigs” are one of the requisites of a “fire priest,” Āθravan (See Vendidad 14.8,) and constitute an essential ritual implement for various liturgical services such as yasná “yearning, longing” (Greek zelós is a cognate,) and afrîn prayers, literally “loving charms” that are Avestan benediction formulas.
The Persian word for tree is draxt also dár ó draxt. The word comes from the Avestan daûrû going back to the reconstructed Proto Indo European *dóru, and is a cognate of Russian дерево (dérevo); Polish drewno; Greek δόρῠ (dóru); Gothic triu; Old English trēow “tree,” (See Didier Calin, Encyclopedia of Indo European poetic and religious themes.)
Trees in Mazdyasna “Mazda worshipping religion/Zoroastrianism” are sacred, and embody immense and enduring life and deathlessness of consciousness.
Sarv-e Abar kuh, literally the Cypress tree of the über-mountain also called the “Zoroastrian tree,” is a cypress tree in Central Yazd province of Iran. The tree is estimated to be at least 4,000 years old and believed to have witnessed the dawn of ancient Iranian civilization.
Herodotus (7.31) reports that at Callatebus in Asia Minor, the Achaemenid Xerxes (486-65 B.C.E.) found a plane tree so beautiful that he decorated it with golden ornaments and put it under the care of one of his Immortals.
The sacred attitude toward venerable trees has continued in Iran to the present day, but with the transfer of devotion from Zoroastrian Immortals to Twelver Shiʿite Saints.
Often, the very pine and cypress trees that had flanked Zoroastrian fire temples in the Sassanid period continue to shade the tombs of emāmzādas and other shia saints today.
In general, however, Iran has suffered from continuous, great deforestation over the centuries after the arab invasion.
Sanctity of trees in Zoroastrianism meant legal sanctions against profaning or destroying them in the Mazdean Jurisprudence. Such legal protections for trees did sadly not continue into the Islamic age. Yet the folk belief that anybody felling a tree will be short-lived, and cuts on his/her good fortune goes back to the deep-rooted ancient religion of the Iranians.
Here is some text I wrote recently for Sally Tripptree’s joint show at The Crypt Gallery in London.
All the little, tiny, overlooked & forgotten births.
Writing on Sally Tripptree’s paintings by Kate Walters.
Spending time with these luscious drawings and paintings there’s a sense for me of being drawn through something; the image which comes is of a comb, or a filter; a pressing though, a milking, fangs against a beaker drawing out the venom, milk-white it drips; she might be pulled through by her hair; but pulled through she is, and the strands of the hair – the pink or the blue – the lightest of touches meets the flesh where it’s brushed with infinite gentleness.
We see mouthfuls of peaches on her tongue – they’re the colour of figs – and we see the holding of bodies, the insides of breasts or of hands cupping, a stroking of flesh. We ask if the flesh has been skinned. It’s muscular and full of blood; it’s blushing from a rushing of blood to the surface through stroking by eyes or hands; such an active heart, pumping a tumescence, an arousal of all the tissues.
This body is being re-membered (& all our bodies). Through this process we enter the shadow with Sally. She’s a warrior entering the cave – the dark place – to become whole. She finds light in the darkness. The making of these images is about enabling ourselves to see, even though it might feel uncomfortable. Births are often difficult, even obstructive, and always involve a crossing over: separation, expulsion, muscular contraction in mammals or the breaking of skins, seeds or shells in other beings. Being born is about going into another, different state. These works are about little re-births, the birthing of parts of the Self to make a new less wounded Whole.
Sally trusts in the shamanic/creative process to take her into the 5D reality where she knows she’ll find solutions. The beings which help her are invited to guide her hands in this 3D world, where things are manifested, made physical. Our bodies are also spirit made gorgeous flesh, blood & muscle; the walls of our hearts and the walls of our organs line the way of Sally’s journey, they lay down with their tiny cellular hands the cinders of her pilgrimage path.
In a dream of Sally which came to me recently she was pregnant, and there was a golden mare connecting with her. She’s pregnant in all these pictures: pregnant with healing and knowing; with holding and carrying and opening; with bursting and tearing and she becomes through her art a “Divinely built castle’ with knowing of ‘the heavenly ones’.
The heart is a ball of golden seeds from an age-old sacrifice ensuring fertility; there are shining teeth smiling at us here; fruiting bodies, ripening follicles exploding into the fingers of airy Fallopian tubes; feeling unseen, she brings her unseen-ness to the light – she makes her own light – she thinks about giving on another level, going through the doorways of barren-ness to a wonder-dress of new skin.
There are chaotic, crazed and charged lines of nightmare and loss; disappointment opens the belly into a cave, simultaneously draining the heart; there’s the boundedness of breath and body, wish and hope, joy and sorrow. There’s the mashing of impulse and memory into the sore-lipped womb; then like a miracle the teeming muscular flower opens – and a butterfly beats against the window, softly.
As I spend time with these paintings a silver fairy on the floor sleeping will waken & watch me from the pigment scattered around my feet.
You can feel Sally’s animated fingers meshing with the pigment, or dressing the wounds with ointment & white gauze; she brings unguents, she anoints, baptises all the lost minds, all the bodies who have lost their minds: she brings them together.
She washes limbs after wars, she dresses the column of the spine with embracing breasts, she dreams about ‘blowing out my shadow’, and in the morning the perfume of the soul lingers over her bed, animal body waking with a snort: not lost, she’s reddening, transforming, bringing her pale-bone ribs to pierce the skin of all our shadows.
Kate Walters. July 2022
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with his golden words he tries to hide or stop her bleeding… work almost complete…oil on canvas.
and a few studio notes, first draft, from July after my solo show at Arusha Gallery…so feeling my way back into the painting, and changing my focus slightly, aligning with my feelings around the coming climate catastrophe…and the need for us to not turn away from the trauma this will birth in us and all creatures, peoples… Studio notes from black notebook July and August 2022
Going backwards from July 31st
Mother Nature bleeds, empties her womb
With his words he tries to hide or stop mother nature’s bleeding
Her tears go into the funnel of a flower
In the drawing their heads are wrapped in the long golden arms of dream and there’s a dark space where their mouth is
His tears make an arm
He’s a man with crying words, with words that cry
He’s a man whose words cry
She’s a woman with her tongue in flowers, her tongue on fire
I’ll paint a picture of me with all the flowers at all my centres
And I’ll remember the journey to the clouds and the ladder and the dark man who came to meet me up there and told me that all that matters is LOVE; it’s all there is.
I’ll paint an animal -headed creature holding me.
And a couple embracing and their antler wings growing from their backs and from spirit (she likes them) and into their hearts their thoraxes like butterflies they carry the memory of who they were before in their sap, their green blood, the drawn fluid, the velvet tips, my closed eyes and your breath so light like the drawing, hesitant
In the painting her vulva becomes the top of his head/wounded/injured place.
Hearing a family of blackbirds in the garden and watching their flying lessons
I wake from a long and difficult dream
I draw him with the young angel rising like a new planet from his navel or a cloud of semen or a branch growing horizontally from one tree to another; it’s an eye encased in wood or tears with thick blonde lashes making a pool where you might bathe
And I will give him some of my petals to line his chest cavity, making a new bed for his wounded heart
I paint the beauty of his soul – or some other mythic male who comes through him –
And I read about, am inspired by, the great bright bulls who run with milk and carry babies in all their bellies, who rub up butter and milk with themselves (as I do)
and it will rain with seed
I paint myself settling like a flower in his thought
My dog looks up at my face to see if I am crying. She keeps doing this.
Yesterday afternoon when I was crying she placed her front paws on my chest, and looked into my face with such love and empathy. She knew I was sad and she did all she could to show me she knew and she was sorry, and she wanted to comfort me.
The blood on the floor from my cut foot looks like a pool of paint. I dip my finger in it, I draw the horse’s head.
I read Jung and what he wrote about the opposites slumbering side by side;
After my dream of the charge and my navel and my father (and the message which arrived about him a week later, strange)and the analyst and you and I lying side by side, head to toe, like ouroboros you said, the snake which rides above your nipple over your heart. (24.07.22)
Photos below taken on Iona, of the spirit of the man-angel who was with me, aroused, in the wall of the cave at the bay at the back of the ocean; and the eyes I saw watching me from the trees in the organic garden near the Nunnery.
I’m recently returned from a long weekend in Edinburgh where I had a stand at The Artists Book Market at The Fruitmarket Gallery. I also gave a presentation on my work around adapting found books, with a focus on Trauma and what we find Unspeakable.