When we went to Assisi, a few years ago, we stayed with a Franciscan brother. Each morning he rose early to say prayers in the little chapel before breakfast.
One morning I joined him for prayers, and I found it an intense and moving experience. He read from Deuteronomy, and I was shocked at the power of the image revealed by the words:
“Circumcise therefore the foreskin of your heart, and be no more stiff-necked…” Deuteronomy 10:16.
The course on Iona must have 9 participants to run, with a maximum of 12. I already have three confirmed participants.
Tremenheere Sculpture Gardens
Be a gardener
Dig a ditch
toil and sweat
and turn the earth upside down
and seek the deepness
and water the plants in time.
Continue this labor
and make sweet floods to run
and noble and abundant fruits
to spring. Julian of Norwich
I’ve had a lovely weekend working in the garden with all the dozens of plantlets I’ve raised from seed. It’s been great to be out in the sunshine, with bare skin, the scent of soil and lily of the valley and honeysuckle, and the chorussing of sparrows and wrens. One of my special morning rituals this time of year is to take my breakfast outside into the greenhouse to watch my baby plants growing….I just stand there, being attentive, watching over them.
I’ve resumed my long-term residency at Tremenheere Sculpture Gardens, and each time I visit, I love the garden more. Last week I spent time sitting near a tree doorway for jackdaws, who were raising young. I wrote notes and edited my writing from the past three years, hoping to make a book about my time in the garden to coincide with my exhibition in the gallery there in September 2019. I will be posting some images soon. For the moment they are gestating.
I’ve been enjoying working in series on pieces considering ancestors, how we carry traces of them in our bodies, and where energetic buds for the memory of them can be held in our bodies. These works will be shown at Arusha Gallery in Edinburgh in March 2019 – when my new book the Shetland Notebooks will be launched.
Girl with own piece of ground
Infant with ancestor buds (part of a sequence, studio phone shot only)
I’m looking forwards hugely to the Panel Discussion on May 21st organised by Trewarveneth Studios, and featuring Professor Penny Florence and Dr. Ryya Bread. The discussion will explore Creativity and Openness. This event is kindly hosted by Newlyn Art Gallery, and will be part of Open Studios.
There are more details on our Facebook event feature. https://www.facebook.com/events/252956245271789/
I’m also listening to music in a more focused way, preparing for my residency with Jam on the Marsh in July, when I will tune into the music as it is played in the churches, and I will write and draw on site.
https://www.jamconcert.org/jam-on-the-marsh/
Here is the link to art.earth….about the forthcoming exhbition….
http://artdotearth.org/exhibition-karen-lorenz-and-kate-walters/
Baby hears herself in song.
In the Garden Gallery, Dartington, I will be showing a series of works with my friend Karen Lorenz, opening April 12th (6 – 8 pm) and open until May 15th.
Some of my work will be new pieces influenced by time spent on Shetland, and some will be the works made pre-Shetland. I’ve recently been thinking more about my process …here are some thoughts and reflections…
I’m very interested in frequencies and energetic vibrations – and classical music which I listen to all the time. I am trained in classical shamanism and I have a lot of knowledge/experience related to that which I draw on.
Baby song
Mother as Source
Mother with pouch catches baby
Baby with spirit Parents of SongCourse at Shorlands Old Farm on Exmoor with Kate Walters
April 20 – 24th (arriving Friday afternoon after 4 pm, leaving Tuesday morning after breakfast).
Walking, drawing, writing, and painting: tuning into the wild beauty of the place.
Two places left suitable for two friends or a couple (double or twin room).
£500 each or £550 for a single occupancy.
Further details: We will have the use of a large studio on the Farm, which we will work in if it is wet and during some evenings. We will be free to roam on the farm, and we will make a couple of longer walks to wild high points and to the ruins of a mediaeval village.
I will go into detail about my working method and show some recent work. We will look at the poetry of indigenous peoples; work with the Dark Sky, the dream, and practice shamanic walking (a very peaceful and energy-conserving way to walk). There will be the opportunity, safety and space for some deep creative work. It is a lovely group of people already assembled. Please get in touch for further information and to confirm your place. k.walters@outlook.com 07816 098807 – thank you!
Babes with Salty Tongues
An exhibition of works in watercolour (2008 – 2018) and a small selection of framed archive watercolours (some shown below), including two works which were shown in the Jerwood Drawing Exhibition in 2008.
At the Borlase Smart Room, Porthmeor Studios, Back Road West, St Ives, TR26 1NG
Opening celebration Saturday March 10th 17.00 – 20.00
Open Monday – Saturday 10 – 5 most days (Please call this number to check the room is open before you make a long trip: 01736 339 339.)
I will also be writing and working in residence on Saturday March 31st, 11 – 5 pm. I’ll give a reading from my notebooks at 3 pm; afterwards there will be a Q & A – all welcome!
The exhibition runs until April 8th.
Listening to myself, far away
Baby muzzle animal-brown and twitching
in amongst the spirit grass
thread of sound on the breeze
finds you, tiny babe floating adrift.
In 2017 I was able to spend two periods in residence on Shetland. I went to write and to make work. I’d travelled intending to work in oils, to explore my painting, but the residency room was spotless and I didn’t feel I could risk oily spills. So I walked and wrote and made drawings. The nights were short and pale; I made myself a nest in my bunk bed, draping the sides with blackout material to enable me to swim into sleep, away from the revolving eyes of the lighthouse and the late low Sun.
During the days I’d walk the spotless beaches, the sandy spits, the brilliant-weed-encased piers and brochs; fish heads swam on tides, Terns hovered overhead, kites to my mind; orca stormed the coves, and seals sung to me. I was lured onto rocks, black, shiny, high and low as birds’ flight tunnels, birth canals for dream.
One night I saw myself in a disembodied womb, floating in space. I pulled on the cord through the starry cervix, out I came, unfolding and erect in a moment, and then quick as a comet, I disappeared. Awoken and startled I wrote and then I began to draw, with watercolour. This was 7 months ago, and still the drawings come, all rooted to that dream. The series currently numbers around 300.
Essay on these works by Rev’d Dr. Richard Davey:
Painting is a physical and decisive act: a mark initiating a world, forcing a form into existence, drawing ephemeral fragments from the imagination into physical being. Paint builds – it structures and shapes, leaving a pigment deposit on paper and canvas; allowing formless things to become concrete, drawing the invisible into perceivable being. But this is not what we encounter in Kate Walters’ Shetland watercolours. These are not paintings that build form, but vehicles through which we are pulled into formlessness; encounters with the ephemeral rather than the physical, a breath of pigment deposited onto paper that suggests figures and forms without defining their solid presence. Figures float into being, still tethered into the void, their weightless form a hesitant proposition. The origin of these tentative creatures was a dream granted to Walters when she was recently staying on Shetland; a vision of her foetal form cast adrift in a disembodied uterus, its unbounded body free of physical constraints, floating in interconnected communion with the universe. It is perhaps unsurprising that such a dream should have come on Shetland, a thin space where physical boundaries are dissolved in the constant ebb and flow that blends sea and shore in a swirling, unresolved flux. As she watched seals blur the line between sea and air and terns draw soaring patterns in the air before plunging into crystalline waters, Walters herself became a shamanic hollow bone, a conduit between the physical and immaterial realms. In her sketches she is seal, fulmar, tern and foetus, a boundary crosser, diving into a cosmic space before birth and after death where everything is held in unresolved, undifferentiated potential.
Below examples of notes, first drafts….I’m working on these for my new book Shetland Notebooks, to be launched March 2019 at Arusha Gallery in Edinburgh.
Silent rivers connect us. Rivers underground. Rivers of sleep. Rivers growing in feathers, birthing from bird skin, pale-follicled, scented. Rivers speak to each other. Veins borrow form, belly-burrowing.
The infant is saddled. A saddled infant.
Cervix protrudes. The protruding cervix, rope of umbilicus attached. Pink rope, twisted with grasses and hair. The face I came to find is the lamb’s face up on the hill, abandoned. Her eyes stare and rock in sockets, white and blue as newborn orbs in grassy cribs.
Another rope connecting mouth and anus lies yellow and pink on the island finger. Bird brought down or died blind. Dagger head asleep. Overhead weary sky gods brush heavy sleeves, smearing blue to bruise. But the island is emerald pocketed, treasury. I sit and watch a seal balancing on a rock as the tide insistently grows. Necklace of red breaks around you seal, I see it. You are washed off the rock, you disappear into a cave. I wait to see you again.
Spell of night shows girl child with lashes long as horse tails tilting upwards; they make her climate mantle, hollow tubes to sky.
Beside her a cow, skin made of Heaven-flakes flying down from the sky to clothe her body in gold.
In another drawing my breasts have the sensing of animal muzzles, I hear myself from far away. I dream of Orkney, violet on grey, of a man in an old house, or climbing among ruins, of wanting to be there.
She carries the night on her shoulders, she has a cord to night, it emerges from her shoulders, grows into a tree. I wear reins to restrain me when I become too wild.
Skeleton baby
Tears to bone, water to bone. Baby who floats. Baby upside down. Babe in her nest, babe with wings like sails she gathers up. Dreaming of a rare brown flower, and of being told the world had lost all its magpies, feeling sad.
The breath of my feet grows lungs.
Breath vessel a sky tree makes. Baby connected to organs she borrows from birds. Birth canal as beak, umbilicus stiff, bird’s tongue.
The tongue, the nosebleed and the body.
Baby feet two little penises in a cocoon.
The world between: placenta, umbilical cord, foliage, forests, language, tongues and fragments of faces.
The wet limb, ghostly father
Babe in Spirit Eye, Spirit Sky seed.
womb with teeth, womb fenced in.
Male womb found by spirit babe.
Finding the male womb in space, in the quiet eye of the stillborn lamb nestled swollen on a Shetland hill; in that part of the face, a fragment, resting; in the torn end/tip of the umbilical cord trailing on the grass; in the tip/on the toe of the soft birth hoof white, waxy; forever virginal spirit-borne, colourless visitor seen only by keen eyes, those who sit on heathery hillsides, the watchers, the walkers at dawn, the far-away ones, the wakeful.
I’ve been working with a range of artists, female and male, for around three years; these artists are friends, colleagues, and former students I’ve met whilst teaching at Newlyn School of Art. We’ve had group exhbitions at Newlyn Art Gallery and The Plough Arts Centre in the past two years. This up-coming exhibition, with a few new artists, will be the last one curated by me, as I need to concentrate on other projects, including an expansive cycle of new works emanating from experiences on Shetland.
This exhibition at Bridport Arts Centre will feature drawings, paintings, sculpture, prints, digital poetry and animation. The artists explore themes such as the human – animal relationship, mothering, the body, wisdom, memory and darkness of the body; chance, the invisible, the holy/ancient/archaic feminine and also the gifts which come from exploring Shadow.
………………….
I’ve just returned from Bridport; the installing of the Show, the Private View, and the walk and talk. It was three days’ hard work but it has come together into a cohesive and intense exhibition of works. I realised, when reflecting this morning about the talks we gave, that much of the work is about unearthing what is hidden/unseen/buried/discarded. I spoke about ‘leaving events’ introduced to me by archaeologists on Orkney: the ritual sculptures left for people to find inside sealed up entrances of settlements (the Ness of Brodgar). Penny Florence spoke aloud the sumptuous writing by the late and much missed Partou Zia, and about Valerie Dalton’s work, her excavation of trauma precipitiated by the umbilical cords of dreams; Karen Lorenz spoke about memory, knowing and loss….the loss of awareness, the loss of home; Maggie O’Brien spoke about the truth behind the myth of modern stories about marriage and physical beauty; Max Burrrows spoke about the beauty of mothers hands performing seemingly unremarkable tasks; and Sally Tripptree spoke about the body, the breath, and the imprint of loss.
The talk was well attended and we are grateful for the attention they gave to each of us; workshops will follow in a month.
The Private View, to which all are welcome, is on Friday February 2nd from 6 – 8 pm, with a short introduction from some of the artists. There will be a longer walk and talk with some of the artists on February 3rd at 11 am, for approximately one hour.
Workshops will follow in early March: Drawing Workshop with me, Kate Walters on March 4th, 1-5 pm, maximum 12 spaces; considering the animal body and drawing from within the impulses of the body.
Book binding with Karen Lorenz on Monday 5th March, 11 – 4 pm, maximum 12 spaces; and a digital poetry workshop with Professor Penny Florence, Is Form Gendered? on Saturday 10th March, 11 – 4 pm, maximum 12 spaces.
Booking through the Arts Centre www.bridport-arts.com
https://www.bridport-arts.com/event/drawing-down-the-feminine/
The poetry of form, the poetry of water, of paint, of flesh, of whimper, of memory, of winter.
Of unwanted limbs and restless hands. Of unanswered cries, of unstroked palms; of tiny hands worn to stumps through wanting.
Of motherhead-grown legs & a face lamb formed wet on the hillside, left in the sun for bees to breathe in, and sap to suckle; flesh with mist, limbs black and languid…cot-babe opened out on hillside, island-baby black-rocked and wild, bird-beloved, beaten out by Picts.
The One with the flight-burrowed breast
Owl-hollowed heart-nest
limbs bent as branches bleached,
cold;
Hammered in place on the hillside,
mountain-top white where bird voice high-pitched shrieks…
A plea in a high place,
snow-clean, praying, solitary, sleeping.
The Spirit of the Wind is not silent. It is dark, deep-furred, it growls in the night and tramps about this tower in the ocean, stirring up the depths.
The elbow of the storm holds this place in an illusion of safety; and it holds me: I’m tiny, light as snow bunting – I hide from hungry snow mouths who bend on their many necks around me.
I listen to the voices of wind, hollow and now thrusting, then to the voices of my cells as I turn to face the wall in my bunk; I know the arm of cloud sweeping over the black sea is drawing a violet haze to haunt the dusk.
I sleep long hours and dream of a large-breasted bird, and of being born on a serpent through an arch, riding it with my companions. I know it will carry me safely through my life.
Being called to place. The place which calls. Waiting for the spirit of this work to show itself to me. I walk towards Horse Island over dark rocks smelling of iron. Something black moves on the soot-dark rocks near the incoming sea. Seal spirit. I remember the white seal pup with the mark of man about it’s neck. I feel the traces of her. Across the rabbit-hollowed turf the ghosts of terns in feather cairns and limpet shells; dark pools of peat-rimmed sky watch the clouds descend. I wear violet across the faded green. I remember my dream of waiting for my Father. Others were waiting too. Many men came through the opening. Then he came to meet me, fatherly, broad, warm, kind; he was the one I’d recognise, and I did.
I sit on cold straw-coloured grass beside the blue-black sea. Night comes. Water horse white and sleek around a corner of my awareness. Salt-scented air, clean.
I will collect the contents of the bird’s stomach, wash it in rain, make a necklace of it. Fish bones from far away carried in a bird’s body through sky.
https://www.sumburghhead.com/
The Mothership April 2017 Kate Walters
A green mouth, woody fingers, bowls of deer dust and wire pulled hair (in my pocket on Shetland, even in Italy: it sticks)
Walking in Sun along leafy lanes, red carcass beside the road, enormous, stenchy, a story about a farmer who beheaded a cow, left her here, ignominiously, to rot red to black in the early summer heat
Memories of a farm and badgers, and another farmer who didn’t believe me when I said that I’d shared a bed with badgers when young, one had swung on my nightdress in play and I had darted about the house in fear…
The farm with perfect meadows and flowers, and everything has changed in thirty years…. Kingcombe
And of railway cuttings dark and forgotten with broken bridges and shadowy pathways
Meeting an old friend up on sandy ridges in cold wind speaking of teaching and people I know no more, and of views across Dorset barrows I rode on when young with my childhood friend now dead. Mary.
A hot room with sunny windows and huge trees old friends watching me as I wondered, felt inadequate – sad even – thinking of Rilke and the strings of luminous, running deer; my son came and we sat beside other trees in the woods, the sun bathed us and the tracks of deer narrow and plaited I came to know as my hand.
In the garden with seedlings and soil and geese bathing joyfully opening wings white- wide, I took my son to visit an old lady who had held him as a babe, and loved him as her own, knowing she would not see him again; and of being recognised in Powerstock from living here twenty years and more before;
Of trees spreading crowns sun swollen, gorgeous.
I drew in my books and felt lost.
