Sacred Hoop

Kate Walters prepares for the exhibition 'Holy Animals Sacred Plants' at Tremenheere 12.6.26- 25.7.26

 

I collect old books to draw in. I like the way fragments of text emerge or are revealed amidst the armature of the drawing. Books about animals and birds, insects and poetry, especially in Italian or French, are great favourites.

Two summers ago I was in Naples for a few days after a residency in Abruzzo National Park. I found many books on the stalls lining the streets. Two or three euros each. I returned home with a very heavy suitcase!

In the forests of the Abruzzo I drew in books entitled 'Mountains', as I sat in the shade leaning against dry tree trunks growing steeply above me. There was silence and a faint breeze. Spent shell cases were hidden in craters, buried in old leaves. This place had been on the front line in a war. I shivered as the ghosts of creeping figures shimmered past.

As I’d climbed up the rocky track into the mountain earlier that morning, a young boar ((Scrofa selvatica) had crossed my path. As I walked in the early morning silence I knew they were there; the air was electric with their nearness. Then I glimpsed - to my left over the tops of stony hedges - the slabs of enormous hairy brown flanks moving slowly, grazing.

Impossible to determine what they were, these great hunks of animals. I listened to their breathing, their rustling in the dry grass. They might have stepped alive from an ancient cave wall. I was tense and silent as I walked parallel, wondering if I could approach them. Then I stopped, was still as a tree - breathless with joy - as a magical encounter unfolded: a sow came out from the trees and crossed my path, pausing to look at me before urinating to mark her spot. She moved away slowly into the canopy of trees.

As I prepare for the forthcoming exhibition 'Holy Animals Sacred Plants' at Tremenheere, I find peace most afternoons in my studio. I’m working on drawings in books about ancient Persia and Mesopotamia. Treasures and jewels of Ur, holy deer and ragged goats caught in bushes of thorn; antlers, hooves and branches of gold. I draw around the figures, I find their profiles offer the sense I'm searching for in my drawing. I'm remembering a painting from two years ago of a girl holding a sacred hoop (pictured above). The sacred hoop of the people/all of life is what we are currently beginning to break. The sacred knowledge of nature, of the connections of peoples with creatures, all being held together in relationship. The girl is the innocent, the one with the heart who can hold it all, who offers healing and gentleness in the place she occupies.

Perhaps she is Agamben’s 'Unspeakable Girl', the one who stands between the worlds. She’s also Persephone, goddess of the Underworld. For some reason I’ve come back to this.

I found a little drawing, a fragment really, and I saw how delicate it is, but still manages to hold the same truth as the larger oil painting of the same girl. There's an awkwardness to her, shyness; a diffidence. Her arms are stretched as she holds the hoop. The hoop is full of seeds, of seed cases, of rays of gold. The animal's body beside her in the new drawings is open. Its hoop is open, not broken. It pours with light.

The animal offers its open body to us. It's where we might enter. To be held, to be contained, to be safe.

Kate Walters. June 3rd 2026.

 

The exhibition, which will later move to New Ashgate Gallery, Farnham, will feature paintings, drawings, sculptures, mixed media, writing, performance and installations by a group of artists who understand their work to be made under the wing of Holy Animals and the gynoecium of Sacred Plants. The group came together for their first gathering in April 2025 during a course led and developed by Kate Walters with the aim of deepening their creative practice in relationship with the natural world and bringing their work to a wider audience through sharing and exhibiting. Since then, they have met regularly under her guidance in specially chosen locations such as The School of Art and Wellbeing (Devon) and Plan-it Earth (Cornwall).