Kate Walters Cornwall and Isles of Scilly, United Kingdom

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Kate studied Fine Art in London, Brighton and Falmouth; currently based at Trewarveneth Studios in Newlyn, Cornwall. From 2000- 2007 Kate trained in classical shamanism, learning about First Nations’ people’s relationships with Nature, totems and invisible worlds. She learned to work ceremonially and with intense attention. Juried shows include Jerwood Drawing, Discerning Eye, RWA

I'm a painter and a writer. Each medium leads on the other, with all the meanings that phrase suggests. I often write in the middle of the night, reflecting on my paintings/imagery/symbolism, and the writing in turn affects the paintings which come the next day, in my studio. Themes include the Imaginal, Sufi mysticism, creatureliness, female sexuality (jouissance) and how we feel ourselves to be part of the ecological stream of consciousness.

A Love Letter to my painting. In the new painting, with the warm golds and carmine lake, my nipple plugs the hole over your heart. At first you had an apron of light. I ask: were you a man who worked with fire, a smelter of hearts, one who pumped bellows, breathing in life to form? Did you hammer with a hollow ringing tone those shoes of celestial horses, calling them back to earth? I see you as the farrier of my heart. I bring all my long-maned horses to you, you stroke their necks, calm them. You fashion shoes from iron dug from pits, and after plunging them into pails of water you meld them to my sole, my tissues burn with your kisses of fire.

In the painting you lay out for me a bed of broad tongues. They spread out from your navel, muscular antennae which I sense across the room when I come to sit with you. Your tongues are silent and attentive. There are things I don’t understand yet. Sometimes your tongues move slowly, from side to side; but mostly they’re quite still, resting heavily on the floor between us. They grow larger, swelling with a sweet blood and glistening with a deep redness; curling slightly at their edges with their blue veined muscularity. The tips come close to me and I become aroused, but I remain still. Sometimes your tongues seem to have a life of their own. They’re descended from sea-creatures, they taste of salt, I taste them on my lips. They wash in the mouth of the room like whales’ tongues in the immense seas of their bodies. A song rests on them. I pick it up.

Here is some recent writing – by two poets I admire – about my work:

Kate Walters’ startling images go straight from the eye to whatever emotional nexus it is that primes and enriches our inner lives. Their visionary quality is evident in both form and impulse; they are compelling for what seems a wholly instinctive fusion of the visceral with the lyrical. And they are confrontational, presenting as encounters from dream just as dream relates to those deep quotidian mysteries to which we are most often blind. David Harsent ……………………………… Madonna della Salute The golds on the legs of choughs streaking across the Dolomites or lemon groves exhaling in early evening, a field candled with buttercups and soft-breathing cows, gold on book spines and the ichor of a final sunshaft as towering cumulonimbus clouds thicken over the canal: all of these running into the rare quality of how you paint her tears. Karl O’Hanlon ………………………………