Kate Wyatt

“My direct concerns are with Britain’s rural environment, whether it be a village, fields, rivers, hills or woods and this is where my work originated. I enjoy depicting British wildlife and my work comes from direct observation interwoven with my spiritual awareness of the complexities of different life forms.

Working primarily in watercolour and mixed media I enjoy working from life in the countryside with animals in their natural habitat., which means many hours spent in field studies. In order to work on the animals I need to use a great deal of fieldcraft as nothing stays still for long. I always prefer to sketch from life despite the constantly changing british weather. Many of my sketch books and watercolour studies show evidence of inclement weather but I feel much more alive outside. I owe this legacy to my parents who introduced me to the natural world with their love of it and I have been passionately interested in nature ever since I was told to ‘ go out and play!’ This freedom to do as I wished all day long led me to explore the natural habitat of woodlands, fields, hedges and the wetlands of Dorset and Somerset where I developed my curiousity of nature from a very early age.

I am interested in the argument put forward that the human brain is in fact only at the development of about five minutes past the beginning of our consciousness, our more primitive selves, and that we may, in the future, evolve in areas in which we haven’t even begun to explore.

This in turn, has led towards my interest and study of the Shaman and shamanic beliefs amongst indigenous peoples, and the inclusion of the perception of shape- shifting throughout history.

European folk tales become part of this journey as they belong to the ‘five minutes past creative’ part of our mentality, if people are placed in certain situations outside their comfort zone, they can become very imaginative; a night in the woods, an old house, in the darkened countryside, sitting around a camp fire, this is where our more ‘primitive’ selves will begin to emerge.

Children are much better at imagining than adults and this imagination is often dismissed and discouraged as we become adults, without our imagination we become the poorer. The belief in different beings other than ourselves is something that we enjoyed or were fearful of in childhood, but without our imagination or dreaming, Art would maybe not exist and we would be poorer for it.”