Response to my work by Tanja Ernst * info@ernst-tanja.de *www.tanjamariaernst.de * tanjamariae.wordpress.com

Kate Walters by Tanya Ernst (translated from the German by Karen Lorenz).

Flesh and Stars  – zwischen Himmel und Erde

 

Amongst other things happening in the past few months, I came across the work by Kate Walters when I researched the Internet.

I was browsing through images when suddenly I saw this animal on dark background, mysterious, ambiguous, and of unusual stillness.

Her work touched and moved me so strongly that I would like to take up the opportunity and introduce her, and thank Kate for kindly agreeing to do so.

 

I guess it must be, as often mentioned, that her work cannot be explained or fathomed in an academic way of thinking. She does seem to conform to any established position within a succession of art historical achievements. (Though something possibly yet to come)

The work will speak to us if we find the way, if not though, it might remain silent.

From the very beginning I could sense a certain quality in Kate’s work, like quietly singing, or a gentle humming. The dark surface of the paintings and drawings are like the earth, like the flesh of the body, she says. It vibrates subtle colours from which her figures, her beings, her extraordinary dreams of flesh and bodies, growing from and deeply rooted into the earth, are striving towards heaven.

Kate finds inspiration from early Renaissance Italian art, mainly 14th century, and from the natural environment we live in.  She is also interested in the tradition of Indigenous people, their way of seeing and honouring life; their way of being, and being rooted in the natural world.

It is through this vision that Kate’s work strives for a balance between man and nature, the very foundation from which human beings emerge.

For her the quest goes beyond questioning complex ecological systems.

The balance is about life itself, our conscious attitude towards life and the way we regard and respect life.

Everything in this world, Kate says, has its place, its history, is unique and sacred. So her vision reaches out to the world at large in an endeavour to guide us back to the place once held for us, between earth and sky.

There is a particular moment her work seeks to convey;

a moment of stillness and the joy of connectedness; a moment of tranquility, mindfulness and devotion. May the viewer be captivated, touched, and long to submerge once more in the higher order.

 

Within the context of the contemporary art scene Kate Walters considers her position and work as something of an outsider, although she considers it vital that her work is shown within this field. When I recall previous discussions about pickled cows and crystal skulls her view makes sense to me. Yet for our own sake I do anticipate better days: when outsiders like Kate become the norm.

You find more on this in an interview  on Kate’s website

http://katewalters.co.uk/main.html

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Ancestor column, inside the yak, the lost faces.

I have been working on a piece where there are bodies curled on top of one another, embracing the one below. There is a long line of lost faces. A coracle of lost faces; soul spheres travelling from back to belly, and others waiting, hanging in the sky.

Sunday, 17.3.13.

I have been gathering primroses. Yesterday planted asparagus crowns. The earth was wet and heavy.

Later working in my studio. I am inside the yak, mystical creature of mine, one I met once after climbing a ladder inside a smoky lodge, there was a teacher who told me about love.

 

Inside the yak I raise my palm to salute the Heavens, to bless you sky – you came to cleanse my Heart, to make it pure – and the yak gathers my temples gently, raising my face from the dust.

 

Yak with Sky Blessing

work in progress March 19 13

Stephen Lawrence Gallery, University of Greenwich, opened on Tuesday 5th March

Sue Bleakley, Mat Osmond, Belinda Whiting, Karen Lorenz and myself had a great time installing our show last Monday. I had taken the overnight coach from Penzance to Victoria, meeting Karen en route in Torquay just after midnight. We had breakfast in the university cafe, which was great. It was a beautiful morning, sunny and mild, and Greenwich felt spacious, airy and inspiring.

We spent some time placing the works and in the end each artist’s work was displayed together, but each body of work spoke to all the others in many ways.

The Opening was very well attended, and we are all very pleased.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Kate Walters’ curator’s statement

– Being at the Edge: The Edge of Being                                           March 2013

 

My aims with my work, and as the curator of this show, centre around being attentive, fully present in the body, in the moment, and how this can effect a new kind of knowing.

It is to do with paying attention, noticing, being awake, as if death is behind you.

My work comes into being because I am attentive to tiny changes, little glimpses, little breaths, the tiny voice. I am fully present in my studio. It’s about seeing relationships, even if they appear slight or tenuous, initially. For me the edge is where my hand stops and the world begins; my hand is a kind of hinge. It is also about the senses of loss and trust I feel when at work in my studio. It is Eros, a throbbing inside the body, sometimes installed in the body by the sight of a precious face.

Working at the edge of one’s bodily awareness shows me how animal we are too. In Penny Florence’s essay she mentions Elizabeth Grosz “who understands the definition of art as profoundly animal. Through the intensity of sensation accessed in art, our bodies are able to effect transformations, not only of ourselves, but universally. Experience is transformative, and it connects with our animal lineage. Art is not only about what the artist wants of thinks; art is expanded thought-in-sensation.”

I was inspired to put this group of artists together when by chance Mat Osmond sent me an example of his recent work. I was amazed by the text and the drawings; they recalled experiences I had had with a hare on top of a mountain in Italy. I was already familiar with Sue’s amazing animalizing sculptures, Karen’s exquisite films and drawings and Belinda’s beautiful and haunting photographs.

We had many meetings where we discussed the themes and we met in each other’s studios. There follow extracts of texts which developed from these conversations.

Mat wrote that for him

“The work approaches bodyspace as the visceral seat of imagination; it reads the body as neither ‘me’ nor ‘mine’, but the givenness of life from one moment to the next, and as such, inseparable from the surrounding world. It sees bodyspace as another word for imagination – the all-embracing element within which our lives’ various stories surface, interweave, subside. The work conjures a mythic space within which embodied experience can thus be turned over, re-presented, fathomed. It has an interior quality, but approaches interiority not as something pertaining to the individual as against an ‘exterior’ world, rather as something intrinsic to the world itself, and to the process of being dreamt by the world as a dependent, contiguous element within that greater life.

The various compromises and contradictions that arise within even the most mundane levels of experience, and the sense of my own limited and fallible resources in the face of such dilemmas, are the fuel for the work. It turns to imagination as an act of embodied prayer, and it is this gesture of imaginal prayer that is the most basic ‘geography of practice’ for me; likewise, the experience of limit and finitude that provoke that movement of reaching beyond the self is the inescapable geography of place that I carry with me everywhere.”

Sue spoke about an idea for a video: pouring blue-john crystal rock aggregate onto a surface/ floor perhaps, filming children’s knees and hands as they handle it, investigate it.  The spontaneous lives of the children’s hands provide the upward pulling spirit that works against the tug of the crystals that are the bones of the earth.

 

She also spoke of drawing lines, of a dream of winged lines – thinking of Agnes Martin – lines and edges: things being filled, things being empty. So you see what you get: as in Sue’s sculpture, which works with filling things.

Sue said she understands that we live our personal body ‘spaces’ only in the sense that these interact with our physical environments. The environment ‘affords’ particular stimuli to which we respond and we are shaped accordingly. The environment is also a gradient – from shallow to deep.

For example, in West Penwith at the far western reach of Cornwall, there is a unique deep environment – a majestic granite boss that has erupted from below the skin of the earth and left its mark as a surface electromagnetic field. It is impossible to escape from the influence of the deep granite, especially as an eye-line where it runs away in perpendicular stepped cliffs to an ever-changing seascape.

 

If the granite is thought of as the affordance of solidity, overlaying this is the opposite – the transience of bodies. West Penwith is a giant Neolithic graveyard, as if the skin overlaying the granite bed is a death caul. Here are numerous burial sites once containing the bodies of Neolithic and Bronze Age peoples, as a form of literal sedimentation of history, their artefacts buried with them. Contemporary people, in their body spaces, live on top of these burial sites.”

 

On her sculptures, Sue said, “I have been aiming to produce objects that through their clean simplicity allow colonization, multiplicity, and infection, to occur in the mind of the beholder. A second theme is that the sculptures play with what is deep and surface, interior and exterior. They promise clarity but offer opacity. As you look into them, they appear to bounce you off. There is an allure of depth, but it turns out to be all surface. They open up as they seal over. They are perfectly in-focus objects that on closer inspection are out of focus. They look cold to touch, but are slightly sticky with warmth. The larger, clear silicone pieces look like morphing glass. If there is an encompassing theme, it is an expression of life forms based on silicon rather than carbon that at once want to express themselves as they shrink from view. Silicone is a compound of silicon and oxygen, and I imagine that the oxygen is the life force that allows the silicon to breathe. It is the breath of the silicone that the sculptures capture. These themes again capture the tension between the spirit that keeps us light on the earth and the soul that wants to draw us deep, to bottom and dense layers.

 

Karen is concerned with the surface as a place where people meet, where one thing meets another. As, for instance, the coastline, the meeting between the solid certainties of earth, and the sea, which is more tied to memory, to the past, to imagination. Having the enormity of imagination – sea – right there, but intangible, ungraspable, with the concrete world immediately juxtaposed.

 She wrote that “I have always been interested in science and philosophy that ventures beyond the prevailing notion of deductive reasoning, I believe as we wrestle with phenomena and the perception of reality  this predominantly western modus operandi based on logic, analysis and separation has lost touch with their equals intuition and feeling.

Yet there are scientists who urge us to learn from non-western philosophy which regards nature as being alive. I feel very close to the idea that every natural system has something that animates organism of all complexities, that geographic features, plants, rocks, water, etc. have a soul, consciousness, an inner life. It is through my practice, a hybrid between drawing, stop-frame animation and installations that I explore the human predisposition to animism.

The words of James Hillman, the founder of archetypal psychology, are very much at the core of my project in as much as,

“…animism is not a projection of human feelings onto inanimate matter, but that things of the world project upon us their own ideas and demands”, that indeed any phenomenon has the capacity to come alive and to deeply inform us through our interaction with it, as long as we are free of an overly objectifying attitude.”

“When I first used animation I was mainly concerned with how to de-frame an image. Yet an image being ‘instilled with life’ (from Latin ‘animare’) compares to the arrival of ‘the other’, and subsequently changed the framework of my investigation.

The question seems to have settled on the encounter with ‘the other’ and the space in which the encounter takes place. In the given context this ‘ambivalent between’ translates into bodyspace – a meeting ground charged with energy, possibilities and uncertainty.

More specifically I am curious about what ‘comes to the surface’, and the notion of an experienced, perceived, and projected reality.

The projection screen takes on a significant, though ambiguous role. Is it a membrane or receiver? Does it hold back or throw forth and disclose something from beneath, something previously unknown to the viewer? These are just a few recurring questions I like to play with. For me the screen is the edge of interactivity.”

 

Belinda wrote that “Personal issues are an integral part of my work since they have almost invariably been the starting points of lines of enquiry that seek to explore both internal states and the visible world simultaneously. In recent years the themes of memory, loss and the consideration of what it is to inhabit a body have been my central concern.

One of the underlying themes in my work is the relationship between presence and absence. It is a poignant motif that is also fundamental to the medium of photography. The image it presents us with, while affirming a particular and persistent corporeality, functions in fact to re-mind us of what has already been lost; a discarded trace of its subject.

I am interested in the process of erosion and change that plays out as we age and the accompanying fragmentation and dislocation in thoughts and experiences that follow – in particular in the small daily moments that make up our habits and the actions of our lives as we live them: the constantly shifting dance of repetition, holding on, surrender and loss.

 

My enquiry continues into such spaces as the indeterminate moment between actions; the awareness of the moment present and past; the confusion of things remembered vividly or as a dream; the search for the significant moment and the attempt to make meaning.”

 

From Rubem Alves – ‘The Poet, the Warrior, The Prophet’

“Don’t you know that a clear idea brings the conversation to a halt, whereas one unclear idea gives wings to the words and the conversation never ends?’ Maybe this was the reason why Lessing said that, if God had offered him, in his right hand, the knowledge of the whole truth, and in his left, the perennial search for truth, with all the dangers and disappointments that this entails, he would opt for the left hand… Lessing also loved more sailing across the ocean than arriving at the harbour. The ‘thing’ is neither at the point of departure or the at the point of arrival, says Guimaraes Rosa.

It is in the ‘going across’ (a coisa nao esta nem parida e nem na chegada mas na travessia’).”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Teaching and other new shoots

For five weeks I have been teaching evening classes alongside my show at Newlyn Art Gallery. Many people have come and trusted me, working with inner impulses to create personal, strong and beautiful responses. Visit Caro’s blog to see more http://carowoods.com  !

Local primary schoolchildren have also been working from certain pieces in my show, with Amanda Lorens and Cat Gibbard. The children made great collages and sculptures developed after I gave a walk and talk.

 

My Show at Newlyn Art Gallery and what’s next!

Tomorrow is the last day! It has been an amazing experience for me, the best.

Now I am looking forward to the next show, which is one I have curated, at the Stephen Lawrence Gallery at the University of Greenwich. It will open on March 5th at 6pm and run until 3rd April.

I will be showing work with Mat Osmond, Susan Bleakley, Belinda Whiting and Karen Lorenz.      The show’s title  is Being At the Edge:At the Edge of Being.

 

 

 

Rupert’s poem made in response to my show – thank you!

Rupert Loydell is a poet, writer, artist and teacher (contact details below) who I have known for many years. Yesterday he sent me his response to my show ‘The Secret Worth A Thousand’. Here it is:

THE SECRET

WORTH A THOUSAND

Kate Walters, Newlyn Art Gallery, January 2013.

 

 

parked in

the usual road

 

early for

your exhibition

 

fantastic curve

of the bay

 

cold water

dogs and gulls

 

hiss of the sea

white noise

 

dirty orange

pale snow light

 

too cold to write

or draw outside

 

 

 

 

surrounded by garden

amplified sounds

of the garden

 

as if the act

of reproducing the garden

is the garden

 

in the garden

nature is magic

by itself

 

 

 

 

a confusion of

dogs and deer

 

of animal

and spiritual

 

a confusion

of beasts

 

a bestowal

of divinity

 

impenetrable

mysticism

 

theology of goddess,

animal and earth

 

reliant on

intuitive feeling

 

what an artist knows

a personal symbolism

 

excluding non-believers

alarming the uninitiated

 

the only life

she knows

 

 

 

 

The horse with a womb

the horse with a woman

who looked like a leaf

who has become a leaf

and lives inside the horse

 

the horse that ascended

and became light

the horse that remained

in the imagination

and in the earth

 

the fantastical breath

of life in the paint

the words on the page

in the books on the table

asking to be read

 

the heating’s strange roar

sucking air out of the room

an echo of echoes

a pouring out of self

shamanic voice stilled

 

a quiet voice

in the dark

of animal skin

one shaft of light

on the dark waves

 

 

 

 

the deer

licks the doe

like a lover

 

 

 

 

bird as angel

in sacred tree

 

working itself

into a state of mind

 

world shaken off

earth left behind

 

 

 

 

owl bird

feather face

dancing in a nest

of misplaced beasts

 

 

 

 

allocating

what is due

 

to the beasts

and all that grows

 

simple movement

translated as dance

 

the buzz of a bee

considered as music

 

anthropomorphism

as a way of life

 

 

© Rupert M Loydell

Rupert Loydell is a poet and painter. His Tower of Babel artist’s book-in-a-box was recently published by Like This Press. Details at www.likethispress.co.uk/publications/rupertloydell

 

The panel discussion on Saturday 26th January at Newlyn Art Gallery and Laura Gascoigne’s Essay.

I was amazed and delighted at the number of people who came to the panel discussion. The quality of the attention which we as a panel received from the audience was extraordinary. Thank you so much to everyone who came along.

 

Here is the text from Laura’s beautiful piece of writing which she delivered during the morning:

Metamorphosis & Metaphor in the Art of Kate Walters

 

Talking to Kate Walters about her work, it’s interesting how often poetry crops up. Blogging about a visit we made together to The Horse exhibition at the British Museum last year, she described finding a book with a poem by Rilke in her hotel room and quoted the lines: “You run like a herd of luminous deer/and I am dark, I am forest…” Only Kate could stay in a hotel where the rooms contain books with poems by Rilke – poems with imagery so very close to her own.

Kate’s titles tend to sound like poems even when they’re not. Nothing is single if it lives takes Donne’s philosophy that no man is an island and expands it to cover the whole of creation, animal and vegetable. The title of this exhibition itself, The Secret Worth a Thousand, is taken from Goethe and relates to a theme – of man’s kinship with animals – explored in the most painted cycle of poems in history, Ovid’s Metamorphoses.

Gods changed into swans, hunters transformed into deer, nymphs turned into trees… the transformations of matter described by Ovid were the images that launched a thousand Renaissance paintings. And those transformations – and the idea of the wafer thin line between ourselves and other life forms that has now been proved by the scientific discovery that we share 50% of our genes with a banana – still excites the contemporary art world, as we saw last year in the National Gallery’s Metamorphosis exhibition in which Mark Wallinger, Chris Ofili and Conrad Shawcross riffed on Titian’s paintings inspired by Ovid.

These three artists, like Titian, are of course all men. Much of the reason for the popularity of Ovid’s stories in Renaissance art was their eroticism – Zeus’s semen raining on Danae’s bed in a shower of gold was one of the most popular. But these stories of transformation have also inspired contemporary women artists like Paula Rego and Ana Maria Pacheco. One reason, perhaps, is that in the lives of mortals, rather than gods, the female sex has the monopoly on such transformations. Sitting quietly like an animal turning blood to milk, as in Kate’s painting, is something nursing mothers do on a daily basis.

Kate’s transformations, though, go back further than the nursery, and further than Ovid. The shadows of ancient civilizations flicker across her pictures: the many-breasted figure in Inmost Affinity reminds us of Diana of Ephesus, while other images in the show – such as The kiss of the womb restores the souls of the lost – have an Egyptian look. But although Kate draws inspiration from The Egyptian Book of the Dead, she never quotes. On our way round The Horse show, I pointed out a carving she might almost have made herself and she turned away as if from temptation, saying: “I mustn’t copy”.

If Kate’s imagery reminds us of ‘primitive’ art, it’s because it springs from the same ancient source: what Thomas Hardy called ‘the old association” between man and nature. As another of her titles simply states: ‘We share our flesh’. In recognizing this, Kate’s art aligns itself with a ‘primitive’ value system rejected by the modern market economy. As the American journalist Richard Heinberg has expressed it in an essay on civilization and primitivism: “As we grow accustomed to valuing everything according to money, we tend to lose a sense of the uniqueness of things. What, after all, is an animal worth, or a mountain, or a redwood tree, or an hour of human life? The market gives us a numerical answer based on scarcity and demand. To the degree that we believe that such values have meaning, we live in a world that is desacralized and desensitized, without heart or spirit.”

Heart and spirit are at the centre of Kate’s art – you could describe it as ‘sacral’ rather than ‘sacred’. As such it is heir to an imaginative tradition represented in Britain by artists like Cecil Collins, David Jones and Ken Kiff – and more recently by Francesco Clemente in Italy. (By coincidence, Clemente’s latest London show at Blain Southern which closes today includes a painting of a man and a woman within the belly of a horse.) What these so-called ‘visionary’ artists share is a poetic quality – David Jones, like William Blake, was also a poet. Poets deal in metaphors, where one thing stands for and merges into another, and metaphors are the lifeblood of Kate’s art. Women metamorphosing into deer were the stuff of poetry long before Ovid. “Thy two breasts are like young roes, that are twins, that feed among the lilies” might refer to a painting in this gallery – in fact it’s a verse from The Song of Songs.

Sacral art is the polar opposite of Pop Art. It’s slow art, slowly made for slow consumption. You could call it contemplative, except that that sounds too detached. There’s an urgency about Kate’s work that disrupts contemplation – the lap of one of her many-breasted women would not provide Matisse’s businessman with a comfortable armchair.

“When I was a little girl,” she recalled in a diary of a recent pilgrimage to Assisi, “I used to wonder whether the earth suffered when it was covered with tarmac. I had a strong sense of how alive the earth was, and I imagined it was suffocating. I never told anyone my thoughts”. Instead, as a mature artist she has made paintings that strip back the tarmac to expose the suffocating earth beneath. There’s a feeling of self-exposure about some of her work, an undercurent of outrage at our rape of nature and abuse of fertility that gives it a ragged and dangerous edge. The bloodied watercolour Mother Feeding Herself was done after reading about genital mutilation, while The Parts of Osiris she describes as “a response to all pictures of waiting women looking out to sea, putting women back in a position of power rather than weakness”. Here in Newlyn Art Gallery, you could read it as a contemporary feminine riposte to Frank Bramley’s Hopeless Dawn.

 

‘Poema’ was a word the Romans took from the Greeks; they didn’t have a word of their own. The Romans were a practical lot but the Greeks were practical about poetry, because their word ‘poema’ comes from the verb ‘poiere’, meaning to ‘make’. Poetry is a thing made, like painting, and its manufacture dictates not just its form but its consistency: its depth, tone and speed of consumption. In his Art of Poetry, Horace makes this comparison: “As in painting, so in poetry. Some works will captivate you when you stand very close to them, and others if you are at a greater distance. This one prefers a darker vantage point, that one wants to be seen in the light since it feels no terror before the penetrating judgment of the critic. This pleases once, that will give pleasure even if one goes back to it ten times over.” Kate’s poetic paintings belong in the latter category.

 

Laura Gascoigne  

 

Three Points of Contact in Penzance last two days and party!

I have loved working with this group of artists! The feeling of being part of something which has such a great sense of ease and cooperation has been wonderful – and rather new.

https://vimeo.com/57599492  – link to film made during the Glasgow leg. Thanks to all the curators, Judit Bodor, Jenny Brownrigg, and Blair Todd who made it happen for all of us.

We had haggis for lunch today as it is Burn’s Night/Day.

 

New work at the Exchange/dark man/dreams

I have really enjoyed working at the Exchange. I am surrounded by artists, all are working on their own things. But we have so many overlapping threads, when we talk or share or collaborate if feels so natural. Mark and I found the time yesterday to record the dreams I had retrieved from my notebooks. We sat for over an hour in a quiet room, as the sun went down. It felt intense and quite emotionally charged, as I spoke about my dreams, and to a certain extent, re-lived some of them. I felt that they are alive, like little animals, with their own magical little domains.

Here is an example:

I dream of a different world. There is a class, or a meeting of people; we are by a pool in the navel of the Earth. There is deep water, the rocks are soft, there is a strong smell of roses, and many people who  are small in stature, like Siberian Steppe people. I had gone asking for a song, but instead a perfume was taught to me.

 

 

 

A dark man dream: (1996) colourful, of travel, new places, a dark man coming back for me, twice. The first time he gave me a beautiful set of golden tools decorated with flowers. the second time, in a city, he came riding a large young horse – white or black or both at the same time – with just a strap around his neck. I was with unknown female friends. He rode around us in an anti-clockwise direction. He came from a large white-ish geometric sphere I could just see in the distance. There was a vaguely sexual feeling in the dream, of doorways, new beginnings.

An eye dream(2002): A soft pink revolving eye, in a floor below. Was there for healing and penetration of this world, this reality. Good presence.

A bed dream(2002): Of being on a high bed. My mattress was on a join/seam line of one room – Earth- and on the other side of the seam was a different realm.

Boat/heart of the world dream(2003): A boat was coming, a black boat, 2 women in it, twins, old with long hair wavy and grey. They went round and round. I was in the water, the sea, someone was with me. We went underwater, we could breathe, saw light under there, the sun, could feel the earth/sea/world breathing, the heart beating. I leaned against the body of the world, I felt safe, I saw another  boat – pale, luminous – under water and an old man somewhere who took charge of the mooring of the boat above. I woke myself up when I saw the light under the water.