Kate Walters


As part of my work for my current Arts Council England Award, I have been keeping a journal in my studio. I write in this book before or after each session in my studio.
There follows a selection of extracts:

11th May 2007
Making a drawing with many hands. I had thought it was ‘the world prays’ but now I see it is ‘the world begs’.
On the radio this morning I heard about a woman who was captured by rebels who tortured and murdered her family. They made her hang her own baby. They cut her brother’s head off because he refused to rape her. She said she wanted the world to know her story. She is a Christian and does not want revenge but peace and to be left in peace in her own country.
I was thinking of her when I made this drawing, and all the other victims of torture.

15th May 2007
Mother with a white arm. God as Mother perhaps. Drawings recalling Beuys, my recent trips to Frankfurt and Berlin. His installation with the dark mass hanging, I remember being struck by the power of hanging forms.
Am I drawing fragments from a story? Is there a narrative element? Or is it about a moment, a hanging point, a place of choice, of realisation, insight? Deepak Chopra says every moment of insight is a moment of freedom.
Weds. Ascension Day. May 17th.
Drawing today of Dog and Deer. Am I exploring intrinsic qualities/moods/tendencies – dejection, victimhood, martyrdom, soaring, acceptance.
Little drawing became about ascendancy, is that the internal condition of all life?

Drawing yesterday of ecstatic woman, from her hand red pours into a block of red. This connects with her sexual area. Is this about grounding the need to make into form, like lightening fusing with the Earth? Beuys’ piece ‘Lightning with glare on the stag’, referred to before.
These drawings would have more impact on a larger scale. What am I afraid of? Losing the spontaneity? The intimacy? Is Impact what it’s all about though? Like a bomb? Or a tidal wave? Is big bad in my book? Why is that?
Perhaps I see looking as caressing, I want people to be close, to lean forward, as if they are whispering or kissing? Or is shame bound up with these feelings, keeping the admissions small in scale lessens their impact?

21.5.07
Giving birth from the neck. Slaughter. Sacrificial animal from her neck the gushing and is there a figure there? Recalls the beauty of the butchery scene – the relief in the Egyptian display in Berlin. But it is not beauty to slit throats or is it in the giving of the body? (Christ).
The body which gives us our vessel without which learning would be impossible.
More gratitude for the giving of flesh.

22.May 07
Tomorrow will be my first Birthday without my mother. There is a pain like a stone lifting on and off my heart. Today everything seems pointless. I have fed the birds and prepared paper with gesso.
My birthday.
Remembering what Anthony Gormley said about pursuing every avenue, not leaving any stone unturned in the development of work. To do so, to leave unexplored, results in a greater failure.
Is it necessary to feel, to experience emotional/physical pain/anguish in order to make work about these things?
It is the accidental, the chance happening through obliteration, which leads me to the drawings I am happy with. The ones which surprise or shock me, or present a quite new way of looking at things.
24.5.07
Drawing I did yesterday, which I might call Birthday Drawing, about a man’s fist going with force into a woman’s belly, is it her womb? She is headless and suspended. Above her is another headless suspended woman, heavily pregnant. Everything about the man’s body suggests force. He is brutal.

27.5.07
Before me a drawing about prayer, the impulse to pray, how it comes from the body, in this case the small of the back, the loins one might say of a horse or man. The figure is bent over in supplication. There are no feet, the figure is suspended.

31.5.07 Don’t like this work now.

28.5.07  A drawing about intimacy. Two horses resting together. Warm colours. They have their legs tucked in like cats. They are completely relaxed. Another drawing, listening again to Dido’s Lament, of a child bound to a horse. They are still and accepting.

29.5.07 Not sure drawing of a child bound to horse is finished. Not wanting to touch it through need to get into same drawing place.

30 May Not sure where to begin today. Continued with a drawing of a couple, an antelope/deer came in, arches over the woman. The deer being about truth and safety?

31.5.07
Yesterday tried larger paper but it wouldn’t work. Kept changing it. Some parts I like, even those must go today. So much of what I do is about destruction, letting go even of good parts, areas I like, because they don’t work in the context of the whole. Now it is two sad horses, one is dying.
Later. Just made little drawing with horse, head and spear. Is it about consciousness? Already forgetting to date them.

2.6.07
Deer with a tree in the wind but it’s too easy. I must work on it further.

3.6.07
Got rid of the tree and the wind. Is now about generations, ancestors, being supported by our descendants. Went into the place of complete letting go, where I didn’t know what was going to happen, where the drawing has its own integrity, own life.


THE SECRET LIFE OF THE ARTIST
for Kate

Riding the wing of rapture
through nightlong dreams,

flameproof angels collude
with blood and flesh and time.

In the mountains of memory
wolves howl their luetic songs;

in disremembered moments
hoof and hide combust, hair

becomes wing, becomes brush.
Painted wounds open then heal.

*

The past is a journal, a process,
lines hidden under new colours,

possibilities of implication asking
if we are willing to be touched.

So many secrets, so many marks
obliterated. You don't like being

human; the horse gives itself
to the rider, the generous heart

gives birth. All is of the body,
which remembers and cannot lie.

*

Lucid dreaming   animal witness
intimate moments   decoded sound

musical spirits   evoked and invoked
aids to survival   the natural world    

I am blessed with torment   an impulse to pray
I draw out of intimacy   find my own way

spirits surround us   companions   assurance
it is all about others   light in the woods

 I seek out reflection   offer shared experience
trust the unconscious   Trauma departs

*

How the paintings have changed. I clear
away preconceptions, begin to start again,

to renew conversation after all this time.
Goldfish memory has swum away to be

refined, defined, created in new light,
in the moment of arrival or departure.

The woman in the window does not see
me drive away. Her gaze is in the hand,

the way shadows draw on paper, how
shellac glistens and runs: dictated dreams.


     © Rupert M Loydell

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