The title for my show comes from a dream I had many years ago when I first visited Cornwall, before I lived here I believe, around 30 years ago…
I waited and for years my high field was motionless beneath the winds, undiscovered and undisturbed; there was no quivering or opening; there was no ploughing and no witness to any ceremony, awakening or trembling. And he told me over and over again that he would not bring his plough to my fertile ground which was waiting for him. I was the high field left alone, left without the sound of male voices being carried on the wind. And so in the end I came back to my dream and I made my own plough, drawing it out of myself onto paper with my fluids, my pen knibs, my blood and my colours. When I paint I plough with my heart.
– Kate Walters, 2024
More writing which relates to the work in this show…
Thoughts on my work as a whole and the new body of
paintings:
I saw the waking field.
To do with fields of awareness we encounter whilst dreaming, in a trance, mystic experiences
and whilst painting, or being in nature.
…
When I teach shamanic workshops I always tell new people the definitions of shamanism :
The sense, appreciation, that all things are alive and all things are connected;
And shaman: one who sees, one who knows; and one who is inspired by or with fire (Spirit).
This relates to my writing thinking and knowing about the seeing of the Waking Field…
This underpins all my work as an artist…and human being…
…
Ploughing with My Heart.
Inanna and the Waking Field.
A short passage about creativity, dreaming and psychic processes.
Many years ago when I first visited Cornwall I had an experience of how all the fields in the West
Penwith peninsula were alive. I came to know
this fully through making a drawing/monotype called ‘I saw the waking field’. In this small work
I drew myself holding the field as if she were a glass of wine I might drink. It is also a body which
quivers with aliveness. It was through making the drawing
that I was able to articulate my feelings/knowings about the shivering I’d seen the field make, as
if shaking herself awake in the morning, the way a wild animal would, her gossamer coat
glistening in the sun.
A few years earlier in a dream I saw myself opening my chest cavity, taking out my heart, and
stretching it into what I first thought was a
pen-knib; but then I used my fingers to stretch and enlarge the pulpy crimson form, and I saw
within the dream – to my amazement – that it had become a plough, and I began to push the
heart-forged blade through the dark ground of my unconscious; turning it
over, going deeper and darker, revealing her/my fecund blackness…
…………
And one afternoon much later he reached down to a book beside his chair, and he opened the
book at a page he’d marked, and he read me these
words:
‘As for me, Inanna,
Who will plough my vulva?
Who will plough my high field? Who will plough my wet ground?’
‘Great Lady, the king will plough your vulva.
I, Dumuzi the King, will plough your vulva.’
‘He has sprouted; he has burgeoned;
He is lettuce planted by the water. He is the one my womb loves best.
My eager impetuous caresser of the navel, My caresser of the soft thighs,
He is the one my womb loves best,
He is lettuce planted by the water.’
(Diane Wolkstein & Samuel Noah Kramer, Inanna, Queen of Heaven and Earth pp 37,8)
I sat quietly, every part of my body tense. I knew the text already but I was unsure about telling
him. I wanted him to be the one who would
turn over my darkest deepest earth, to plough me. I couldn’t tell him this, but he knew.
I waited and for years my high field was motionless beneath the winds, undiscovered and
undisturbed; there was no quivering or opening; there
was no ploughing and no witness to any ceremony, awakening or trembling. And he told me
over and over again that he would not bring his plough to my fertile ground which was waiting
for him. I was the high field left alone, left without the sound of male voices
being carried on the wind.
And so in the end I came back to my dream and I made my own plough, drawing it out of myself
onto paper with my fluids, my pen knibs, my blood
and my colours.
When I paint I plough with my heart.
I rarely see the man anymore. But recently he sent me these words:
‘Your question about Inanna ploughing her own furrow makes me
think of Jung’s work exactly: that the work of individuation is a process of exactly that: of
working so that the different aspects of who we are (masculine, feminine, old, young, divine,
shadow etc) can find a way to be in intimate relationship so that we
can come fully into being. This is his work particularly on Alchemy, but also on the
Phenomenology of the Self.’
…
Ploughing with my heart – The title comes from a dream I had many years ago which I’m only
now coming to work with in a direct way. It was very powerful and is all about the unconscious
and individuation. It also relates to Inanna and the aliveness of fields of being and awareness.
…
Words in speech marks are written by a friend, alongside drawings in my small found and
altered books…
“Again you are there, where I didn’t expect you to be, in the darkness looking at me.”
“Stretch me out beneath you, let me carry your footsteps over the land
Let your fingers inscribe my skull’s cape, down through my arms and into the ground: your
gentle eye and your sharp beak.” Words written in my books of drawings, by a friend.
“If I bury my face in your flowering womb
Your wounds of the heart, the breast and the sex
Will you feed me or
Will you feed off me?
will we feed off another
Or will something we’ve not yet known
Find their way in
The goddess, this golden icon… would you risk your life, your soul for one moment’s awareness
of this?
I am sad there
….waiting for a time when there is space for me
Sometimes a shattering is the only thing
I can bear: shattering is all that there is
And the brown shawls continue and connect
And there in the debris are you, slowly coalescing
Will you come together
In my
Hands,
milk
Of my eye
Clouds of semen
For your seat
And your shawl….”
My studio notes:
From book beside the bed
“It is the point of de-creation, when the artist in his unparalleled style no longer creates but
de-creates – that untitled messianic moment in which art stays miraculously still, almost
astounded: fallen and risen in every instant.” Agamben 2002
“This is a downward going path of art, and life, that creates via a descent. This is an art that falls.
This art makes its connections through disintegration, disruption, sexuality, chaos, breakdown,
loosening, loss, trauma, and madness.” Agamben in Naming the Gods by Gary D. Astrachan
Being seen.
Or not seen.
‘Poiesis is a bringing forth from concealment, hiddenness and non-being into the ‘light of
presence.’
“Poiesis bears within itself as its original mission, this compelling desire for a complete
transfiguration of our natural state.” From Phallos by Eugene Monick
As if I’d been bitten by a shark. The pain around my lower body, the pain of unlove.
…
Dream of bees (October 2023) in the ceiling of my bedroom. Small black wild bees, they were
nesting. Maybe there was one in my hair. I couldn’t use my bedroom (couldn’t sleep, couldn’t
dream) and I asked my husband to help move them, but he couldn’t do it. It seemed like it was
my childhood bedroom as well as this one, my home.
Note: there are places in Cornwall which harvest honey from wild black bees.
Bees can be seen as divine messengers. They want us to go up, heavenwards. Trying to get
through my ceiling. Maybe I have a ceiling I need to go up, through?
Dream on the following night:
Of a screen/painting with red and white, red flowers from my sage plants. Erotic thoughts of a
man touching me all over with his erect phallus, everywhere he touched me my skin was
marked, bruised, opened, he planted his bulb in me, I grew tulips from all the marks.
Note: reminded me of another dream in which red, wild tulips grew from my bones.
Writing at this time by my Friend:
“In the dark spaces, lost in the dark spaces – and you are also suddenly there sleeping…
I thought you’d gone on, gone away but you were curled up, your aloneness saved in the
wellspring, gold dust shimmering over you – else I would’ve walked by lost, still lost. As I draw
myself up and over to caress the back of your neck, your wings budding over your shoulders, you
know I am here, arriving into form out of the darkness because of you.
Coming into being over you.”
I remember the garden at Clos du Peyronnet, my garden of Paradise when I was a young
woman. I think about creating a garden of paradise with my painting. How beauty, memory, also
trauma are tacked into us, a needle goes through all our layers of being, connects it all, makes us
stronger? We are sewn.
Paint my body as a colorful landscape, the colours are birdsong.
Birds don’t listen to music. Or do they?
The flowers on my tongue.
Flower pregnant with Horse. Flower gives birth to Horse.
Pollinated tears.
Dream of the two eyes that saw everything. Roving, revolving, without lids. Attached to the great
long jaw bones of the eagle, spirit bird of the deeps, night visitor, keep him/her hidden beneath a
dark cloth. Paint the dark cloth, the sea of bones, the tides of skulls.
‘Every time consciousness produces something, even two words, there are always four, because
the unconscious is always there too; something unknown is involved, and that should also be
taken into consideration. ‘ Alchemy, Marie-Louise von Franz, p 153.
‘Horses are liminal creatures who lead humans from the world of the tame into the world of the
wild up to heaven, or down to the artery hell of the cobra people.’ Wendy Doniger Stallions p 17
My paintings know things . They know things about me. They know what to do before I do.
‘I return from trampling upon flowers/And the hooves of my horse smell sweet.’ Emperor Hui
Tsung. (1101 – 1125).
You are the rhizome, I might say to him, the one who hides in the shadows, and behind the
curtain of death. The soul Friend. You with your fingers, your tongue and your phallus buried
deep, I came to know you through the drawing first, and you told me how it felt for you when I
rose from your holy sacrum, Heaven’s Gate. I paint us over and over, your face and fingers
down, and I rise up flowering. We’re lotus too, you my dark roots in the watery place, and the
horse the band of daylight joins us.
I ask about the kind of psychic space I’m painting to house the figures. Should they be in a
landscape?
From The wisdom of the Ancient Seers p 160
‘His stallions are dark, that is transcendent and of the Absolute, but their feet are white as they
bear the light of the phenomenal worlds.’ And ‘All beings remain forever in Savitar, the Being of
transformation. He is the supreme light of creation that is the free overflowing of the
transcendent and uncreate….Divine creativity which underlies all creation and which recreates
and regenerates us in the light of truth.’
Jonah and the whale: coming out of the body of the animal/fish after an ordeal. Animal body as
place which holds us whilst we are cooked, transformed.
It could also be your mouth, where you gently hold me when I’m painting. Your words are me
emerging; all my colours.
The pregnant man pushes his belly against the belly of his bride. The pregnant man can have
three faces. The man wants my pregnancy, he wants my womb, he summons a heavenly belt and
spins it towards me, he plants a spirit bomb in my womb with the heavenly strike. Later, when I
put the painting on the wall, and I see the insistence of the child taking my hand (pulling me
away), and the fury of the horse: I wonder if he is stealing from me.
Reading ‘in the direction of the bird’s mouth’. Painting ‘in the direction of the bird’s mouth.’
Cannot remember source.
Chiron, the holy outsider.
“The mystery of an innate rhythm.” Holderlin.
“A single celestial rhythm.”
“‘Caesura’ or ‘anti-rhythmic interruption’ when the word, as if checked in mid-flight, for a
moment reveals not what it says, but it’s own nature….the verses seem to fall hugging each other
in the silence.”
Beauty that falls. Giorgio Agamben
…
Holy feminine, holy masculine; womb envy; inner child knowing; snake energy;
serpent power; vision, seeing, knowing; the shaman’s eye, various kinds of touch; chakras;
dreaming. I have brought my shamanic persona into these paintings more.
…
A new friend of mine recently wrote this piece below: (December 2023)
I love your art for so many reasons Kate but just now I’m appreciating how dedicated to your
personal journey of becoming you are. It’s important to me as woman, that you take your
guidance from your dreams, intuitions, shamanic connections, relationships, and deeply felt
embodied experiences.
You use your art to be the voice of that feminine power. I and pretty much all the women I have
known struggle to articulate, perhaps to even experience these ineffable feelings. We know
they’re important when they come, but they sound so weak expressed in words through the
steely filter of the rational mind.
We have held back on the unexpressed erotic, messy, visceral, unapologetically cosmic,
profoundly knowing, fundamental parts of ourselves.
At an ancestral level we learned not to expose these powerful aspects of womanhood for fear of
alienation, punishment, even death.
Women themselves can be the most defensive of this shutting down of the essential feminine,
appalled by the risk, the disturbance, the threat of the unknown forces that might be released,
forces of loneliness, poverty, the legacy of a distorted world that threatens unlovability.
The worst fear is of the exposure of our own lack of courage at this time when we are called to
be open and to find strength in vulnerability. I love you and your art for leading the way, with
such POWER. For us all.
Estelle Thistleton Professional Development Coach
February 2024