Kate Pickering | Goldsmiths, University of London (original) (raw)
Conference proceedings by Kate Pickering
Poster Futures of the Real Goldsmiths PGR Conference , 2019
This conference will explore the implications of changes in our conception of a non-human externa... more This conference will explore the implications of changes in our conception of a non-human external reality through the contrasting disciplines pursued by postgraduate researchers at Goldsmiths, University of London. Featuring art presentations, live performances, panel discussions and a keynote address from Dr Ali Hossaini (“a biochemist turned philosopher turned television producer turned visual poet” - The New York Times) on modelling the threat from A.I.
https://www.facebook.com/events/1314031865419347/
Register at: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/futures-of-the-real-goldsmiths-pgr-conference-2019-tickets-61923356426
PhD Thesis by Kate Pickering
This interdisciplinary project examines the entanglements of body, belief and site through an exa... more This interdisciplinary project examines the entanglements of body, belief and site through an examination of evangelical megachurch imaginaries within destabilised ecological contexts. The megachurch is defined as a church with more than 2,000 in weekly attendance, although globally, a significant proportion reach the tens and hundreds of thousands. I focus on North America’s largest megachurch, Lakewood, based in Texas, which deploys scale, spectacle and performance to immerse believers in its story-world. Through theoretical and experimental writing I explore how the individual and collective body is oriented within the site. The believer’s gaze is directed heavenward toward victory and success, away from complex realities.
Setting out from new materialist understandings of the body as entangled in a web of relations and combining philosophy, visual and literary theories, I draw on my position as exvangelical and my own experiences of megachurch evangelicalism to analyse the story-world of Lakewood. Using Mieke Bal’s schema of ‘narrative,’ ‘story,’ and ‘fabula,’ I examine how Lakewood’s immersive multi-sensory texts form a ‘total work of art,’ conveying ideological imaginaries of belonging, order, progress and comfort. I consider how embodied response produces affective atmospheres, a ‘climate of belief’ in which bodies weather unequally. The racially diverse congregation are caught between a sky-bound gaze and earth-bound realities of a locale threatened by hurricane, flooding, subsidence and pollution.
Alongside the dissertation, my experimental text There is a Miracle in Your Mouth is formed of memoir, research and speculative fiction. Informed by a practice of floating and new materialist thought, it reorients the megachurch. Through writing the religious building-body as a fluid, porous and emergent phenomenon, a body/ site that is always enmeshed in ecological connections, I highlight the certainties of belief and the disorientation of disbelief as a bodily and materially produced phenomenon, disrupting the solidity, simplicity and sky-bound orientation of the evangelical narrative.
Papers by Kate Pickering
Journal of writing in creative practice, Oct 1, 2023
Imagining The Apocalypse: Art And The End Times
In 1928 the Thames burst its banks and London flooded. Fourteen people were killed and thousands ... more In 1928 the Thames burst its banks and London flooded. Fourteen people were killed and thousands made homeless. The river wall opposite Tate Britain collapsed-waves cascaded across the road and surged up through partially-filled subterrain ruins of the former Millbank Prison (demolished in 1892). The nine lower ground floor galleries and basement filled with water: 18 artworks were considered beyond repair, a further 226 badly damaged, and an additional 67 slightly affected. Among the oil paintings submerged was artist John Martin's The Destruction of Pompeii and Herculaneum (1822, Fig. 1). After Martin's work was rescued, it was rolled up and stored in another part of the building-subsequently forgotten about until rediscovery in 1973 and restoration in 2011. The painting had been placed in Tate's basement in 1918 as the artist had fallen out of fashion, decades after once having thrilled nineteenth-century audiences with spectacular scenes. The Destruction of Pompeii and Herculaneum depicts the eruption of Italy's Mount Vesuvius in 79 CE. Is it possible to imagine the end of imagination itself ? What might the catastrophic events-both pictured by but also witnessed upon the painting-reveal about the complex entanglement between fantasy and reality when it comes to the ways artists have envisioned the end times? This book will explore the politics of creating images for crisis, and the way such disasters are depicted by artists and politicians. The essays in this edited volume range from recent queer utopias in South Korea to monstrous beasts in eighteenth-century France. Each contribution considers the ways in which apocalypticism is not just a neutral description but a conceptual frame with a narrative structure. Specific to their time and place, visions of Armageddon often involve the organisation of violence: they are usually accompanied by militaristic rhetoric of an in-group under attack from an out-group. Art in Apocalyptic Times This connection with violence may have informed the earliest origins of apocalyptic discourses, which can be traced back to the Middle East's ancient monotheistic religions-or even further back to older Near Eastern and Persian mythologies. 1 Armageddon as a cultural current has always contained a series of conceptual contradictions: beginnings and endings, annihilation and revelation. But the notion of worlds ending is not unique to Judaism, Christianity, or Islam: it can also be found across the globe from Hindu eschatology, to Buddhist prophecies, or Norse legends. 2 It can be both a lived experience and phantastic projection: art and visual culture sit at the very interconnection of the two. Artists and image-makers have long drawn on eschatological thinking to reveal or Robert Mills 21 20 struck, when reviewing Britain's shape in an atlas, by its resemblance to an H-bomb explosion, lending support to this interpretation. 14 Smaller-scale works linked to the GBH series similarly resonate with the political contexts that provoked Jarman's engagement with the idiom of apocalypse. Around two years after exhibiting the GBH series at the ICA, and while planning the film that would become The Last of England, Jarman created a work composed of black impasto, laid thickly over a gilded canvas and imprinted with a cracked pane of glass, that he entitled Grievous Bodily Harm (Fig. 3). The glass, engraved with the words 'VICTORIAN VALUES' and 'Night life' and the letters 'GB', is placed over a sketchy red map of Britain. 'GB' of course references Great Britain as well as the painting's title, while 'Victorian values' call to mind Margaret Thatcher's use of the phrase as a rallying cry in political campaigns from 1983 onwards. 15 The 'Night life' phrase is more ambiguous but could refer variously to the nightmarish shadow cast by Thatcher's policies and the Cold War, and to sites of nocturnal possibility and queer connection, such as the cruising grounds of Hampstead Heath, which supposedly threatened to disrupt the nation's moral compass. Also explicitly dwelling on the menace of nuclear war and climate change is a work in two parts (Fig. 4): a painted panel featuring a shadowy landmass recognisable as Britain, streaked with red and white pigment and painted over a gold ground, and a gilt-framed clockface with its hands forebodingly set at one minute to midnight. The mock timepiece evokes the Doomsday Clock that the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists conceived in 1947 as a metaphor for the risk posed to humanity and the planet by nuclear weapons and climate change. At the time of writing, Derek Jarman's Revelation: AIDS, Apocalypse and History reflecting the intensification of threats in recent years, the Doomsday Clock is set at 100 seconds to midnight. 16 But in the early 1980s, during which Jarman created these works, fear of nuclear annihilation was also very real, as was a heightened awareness of environmental concerns such as acid rain and the depletion of the ozone layer; Jarman's art and writings from his final decade are likewise peppered with references to ecological devastation. 17 The composition and colours of the GBH group and related paintings are also loosely reminiscent of works by William Blake, notably 'The Ancient of Days', Blake's visionary frontispiece to his apocalypse-themed Europe: A Prophecy (1794), which shows the mythical figure Urizen using a compass to impose order on the material world at Robert Mills Fig. 2 GBH Series III and V (1983-84). Installation view at Void, Derry, 2019. Mixed media on canvas, each work 289.6 × 241.3 cm. Private collection.
Group exhibition at Tenderpixel, London 27 June - 26 July, 2014 Cathy Haynes, Fay Nicolson, Kenta... more Group exhibition at Tenderpixel, London 27 June - 26 July, 2014 Cathy Haynes, Fay Nicolson, Kentaro Yamada, Andrea Zucchini, The School of the Event Horizon (Steven Ounanian, Kate Pickering, Emily Rosamond)
The prevailing conditions of contemporary financialised neo-liberalism have limited our collectiv... more The prevailing conditions of contemporary financialised neo-liberalism have limited our collective navigation towards a future, what was once the assumed function of the avant-garde modernist artist has been lost, forgotten or occluded in the ferment of recent theorisaton. This important task of thinking a future needs new forms to orient away from recent practical and theoretical cul de sacs. Conceived as an exhibition examining these logics of orientation, Who Thinks the Future? utilises the methodological tool of synthetic thinking, as developed by Peer Sessions, to combine multiple ideas into complex wholes. Produced from a series of workshops, discussions and group readings, this exhibition proposes a discursive, collective practice that maintains complexity rather than flattening it in consensus, as a tool to produce common futures that can imagine forward again. This practice could be adopted to connect and represent positions across a spectrum, enabling an ecology of ideas to be engendered and enacted, and to rethink the role of the artist in social transformation.
Sanctuary for a Crowd You are in a vast space. You sit high up in the centre of a row of fold dow... more Sanctuary for a Crowd You are in a vast space. You sit high up in the centre of a row of fold down seating, upholstered in a woven teal coloured fabric. Underneath your feet yellow curlicues run through the blue carpet. The air conditioned atmosphere is cool, prickling your skin, but you are comfortable, and wait expectantly. Surrounding you, in front and behind, are large rectangular sections of the same cambered seating which descends onto an immense floor. You look down upon an oval shaped auditorium into which many thousands of bodies are gathering. The seats face towards a wide, brightly lit stage. Above, the ceiling is painted black and is hung with a grid of 16 undulating mesh screens that resemble luminescent waves. These provide a focal point for a complex lighting system, hundreds of light fixtures are arrayed on motorised lighting trusses, multi coloured LEDS and rings of downlighters conjure a spectacular night sky. At the front of this cavernous space known intimately as the 'Sanctuary', above the stalls containing spaces for 250 choristers, three gigantic Diatronics LED screens curve around the stage, advertising a roster of events, including water baptism, a movie night and 'Spark', a marriage conference. Information appears on ways to donate via text, online and an app. A black backdrop is punctuated with an array of small white lights, echoing a celestial body. At a midpoint on the floor, a raised platform houses high definition broadcast cameras with telephoto lenses, connected to the control room in the Media Suite on the fifth floor. Rows of rigging, vast subwoofers and amps sit ready to project the voice of the Pastor when he takes the stage. Below, volunteers with badges stationed at fire exits stand ready to welcome and assist. The gridded areas of seating form curved sight lines all perspectivally gathered onto the vanishing point where the smiling Pastor will stand. Behind this centre point, upon which the cameras are trained for broadcast, an 11 foot wide golden sculpture of the globe slowly rotates. The congregation rises steeply around this spherical configuration, the multiple bodies enclosed within a fabulous construction. Soon, the lights will blaze across the auditorium and the crowd will rise to their feet. The speakers, channelling powerful upbeat anthems, will cause the floor to tremble and produce a rhythmic vibration inside your chest. A collective upsurge of feeling will swell as the congregants sing, dance and lift their hands. You will hear repeatedly that
Poster Futures of the Real Goldsmiths PGR Conference , 2019
This conference will explore the implications of changes in our conception of a non-human externa... more This conference will explore the implications of changes in our conception of a non-human external reality through the contrasting disciplines pursued by postgraduate researchers at Goldsmiths, University of London. Featuring art presentations, live performances, panel discussions and a keynote address from Dr Ali Hossaini (“a biochemist turned philosopher turned television producer turned visual poet” - The New York Times) on modelling the threat from A.I.
https://www.facebook.com/events/1314031865419347/
Register at: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/futures-of-the-real-goldsmiths-pgr-conference-2019-tickets-61923356426
This interdisciplinary project examines the entanglements of body, belief and site through an exa... more This interdisciplinary project examines the entanglements of body, belief and site through an examination of evangelical megachurch imaginaries within destabilised ecological contexts. The megachurch is defined as a church with more than 2,000 in weekly attendance, although globally, a significant proportion reach the tens and hundreds of thousands. I focus on North America’s largest megachurch, Lakewood, based in Texas, which deploys scale, spectacle and performance to immerse believers in its story-world. Through theoretical and experimental writing I explore how the individual and collective body is oriented within the site. The believer’s gaze is directed heavenward toward victory and success, away from complex realities.
Setting out from new materialist understandings of the body as entangled in a web of relations and combining philosophy, visual and literary theories, I draw on my position as exvangelical and my own experiences of megachurch evangelicalism to analyse the story-world of Lakewood. Using Mieke Bal’s schema of ‘narrative,’ ‘story,’ and ‘fabula,’ I examine how Lakewood’s immersive multi-sensory texts form a ‘total work of art,’ conveying ideological imaginaries of belonging, order, progress and comfort. I consider how embodied response produces affective atmospheres, a ‘climate of belief’ in which bodies weather unequally. The racially diverse congregation are caught between a sky-bound gaze and earth-bound realities of a locale threatened by hurricane, flooding, subsidence and pollution.
Alongside the dissertation, my experimental text There is a Miracle in Your Mouth is formed of memoir, research and speculative fiction. Informed by a practice of floating and new materialist thought, it reorients the megachurch. Through writing the religious building-body as a fluid, porous and emergent phenomenon, a body/ site that is always enmeshed in ecological connections, I highlight the certainties of belief and the disorientation of disbelief as a bodily and materially produced phenomenon, disrupting the solidity, simplicity and sky-bound orientation of the evangelical narrative.
Journal of writing in creative practice, Oct 1, 2023
Imagining The Apocalypse: Art And The End Times
In 1928 the Thames burst its banks and London flooded. Fourteen people were killed and thousands ... more In 1928 the Thames burst its banks and London flooded. Fourteen people were killed and thousands made homeless. The river wall opposite Tate Britain collapsed-waves cascaded across the road and surged up through partially-filled subterrain ruins of the former Millbank Prison (demolished in 1892). The nine lower ground floor galleries and basement filled with water: 18 artworks were considered beyond repair, a further 226 badly damaged, and an additional 67 slightly affected. Among the oil paintings submerged was artist John Martin's The Destruction of Pompeii and Herculaneum (1822, Fig. 1). After Martin's work was rescued, it was rolled up and stored in another part of the building-subsequently forgotten about until rediscovery in 1973 and restoration in 2011. The painting had been placed in Tate's basement in 1918 as the artist had fallen out of fashion, decades after once having thrilled nineteenth-century audiences with spectacular scenes. The Destruction of Pompeii and Herculaneum depicts the eruption of Italy's Mount Vesuvius in 79 CE. Is it possible to imagine the end of imagination itself ? What might the catastrophic events-both pictured by but also witnessed upon the painting-reveal about the complex entanglement between fantasy and reality when it comes to the ways artists have envisioned the end times? This book will explore the politics of creating images for crisis, and the way such disasters are depicted by artists and politicians. The essays in this edited volume range from recent queer utopias in South Korea to monstrous beasts in eighteenth-century France. Each contribution considers the ways in which apocalypticism is not just a neutral description but a conceptual frame with a narrative structure. Specific to their time and place, visions of Armageddon often involve the organisation of violence: they are usually accompanied by militaristic rhetoric of an in-group under attack from an out-group. Art in Apocalyptic Times This connection with violence may have informed the earliest origins of apocalyptic discourses, which can be traced back to the Middle East's ancient monotheistic religions-or even further back to older Near Eastern and Persian mythologies. 1 Armageddon as a cultural current has always contained a series of conceptual contradictions: beginnings and endings, annihilation and revelation. But the notion of worlds ending is not unique to Judaism, Christianity, or Islam: it can also be found across the globe from Hindu eschatology, to Buddhist prophecies, or Norse legends. 2 It can be both a lived experience and phantastic projection: art and visual culture sit at the very interconnection of the two. Artists and image-makers have long drawn on eschatological thinking to reveal or Robert Mills 21 20 struck, when reviewing Britain's shape in an atlas, by its resemblance to an H-bomb explosion, lending support to this interpretation. 14 Smaller-scale works linked to the GBH series similarly resonate with the political contexts that provoked Jarman's engagement with the idiom of apocalypse. Around two years after exhibiting the GBH series at the ICA, and while planning the film that would become The Last of England, Jarman created a work composed of black impasto, laid thickly over a gilded canvas and imprinted with a cracked pane of glass, that he entitled Grievous Bodily Harm (Fig. 3). The glass, engraved with the words 'VICTORIAN VALUES' and 'Night life' and the letters 'GB', is placed over a sketchy red map of Britain. 'GB' of course references Great Britain as well as the painting's title, while 'Victorian values' call to mind Margaret Thatcher's use of the phrase as a rallying cry in political campaigns from 1983 onwards. 15 The 'Night life' phrase is more ambiguous but could refer variously to the nightmarish shadow cast by Thatcher's policies and the Cold War, and to sites of nocturnal possibility and queer connection, such as the cruising grounds of Hampstead Heath, which supposedly threatened to disrupt the nation's moral compass. Also explicitly dwelling on the menace of nuclear war and climate change is a work in two parts (Fig. 4): a painted panel featuring a shadowy landmass recognisable as Britain, streaked with red and white pigment and painted over a gold ground, and a gilt-framed clockface with its hands forebodingly set at one minute to midnight. The mock timepiece evokes the Doomsday Clock that the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists conceived in 1947 as a metaphor for the risk posed to humanity and the planet by nuclear weapons and climate change. At the time of writing, Derek Jarman's Revelation: AIDS, Apocalypse and History reflecting the intensification of threats in recent years, the Doomsday Clock is set at 100 seconds to midnight. 16 But in the early 1980s, during which Jarman created these works, fear of nuclear annihilation was also very real, as was a heightened awareness of environmental concerns such as acid rain and the depletion of the ozone layer; Jarman's art and writings from his final decade are likewise peppered with references to ecological devastation. 17 The composition and colours of the GBH group and related paintings are also loosely reminiscent of works by William Blake, notably 'The Ancient of Days', Blake's visionary frontispiece to his apocalypse-themed Europe: A Prophecy (1794), which shows the mythical figure Urizen using a compass to impose order on the material world at Robert Mills Fig. 2 GBH Series III and V (1983-84). Installation view at Void, Derry, 2019. Mixed media on canvas, each work 289.6 × 241.3 cm. Private collection.
Group exhibition at Tenderpixel, London 27 June - 26 July, 2014 Cathy Haynes, Fay Nicolson, Kenta... more Group exhibition at Tenderpixel, London 27 June - 26 July, 2014 Cathy Haynes, Fay Nicolson, Kentaro Yamada, Andrea Zucchini, The School of the Event Horizon (Steven Ounanian, Kate Pickering, Emily Rosamond)
The prevailing conditions of contemporary financialised neo-liberalism have limited our collectiv... more The prevailing conditions of contemporary financialised neo-liberalism have limited our collective navigation towards a future, what was once the assumed function of the avant-garde modernist artist has been lost, forgotten or occluded in the ferment of recent theorisaton. This important task of thinking a future needs new forms to orient away from recent practical and theoretical cul de sacs. Conceived as an exhibition examining these logics of orientation, Who Thinks the Future? utilises the methodological tool of synthetic thinking, as developed by Peer Sessions, to combine multiple ideas into complex wholes. Produced from a series of workshops, discussions and group readings, this exhibition proposes a discursive, collective practice that maintains complexity rather than flattening it in consensus, as a tool to produce common futures that can imagine forward again. This practice could be adopted to connect and represent positions across a spectrum, enabling an ecology of ideas to be engendered and enacted, and to rethink the role of the artist in social transformation.
Sanctuary for a Crowd You are in a vast space. You sit high up in the centre of a row of fold dow... more Sanctuary for a Crowd You are in a vast space. You sit high up in the centre of a row of fold down seating, upholstered in a woven teal coloured fabric. Underneath your feet yellow curlicues run through the blue carpet. The air conditioned atmosphere is cool, prickling your skin, but you are comfortable, and wait expectantly. Surrounding you, in front and behind, are large rectangular sections of the same cambered seating which descends onto an immense floor. You look down upon an oval shaped auditorium into which many thousands of bodies are gathering. The seats face towards a wide, brightly lit stage. Above, the ceiling is painted black and is hung with a grid of 16 undulating mesh screens that resemble luminescent waves. These provide a focal point for a complex lighting system, hundreds of light fixtures are arrayed on motorised lighting trusses, multi coloured LEDS and rings of downlighters conjure a spectacular night sky. At the front of this cavernous space known intimately as the 'Sanctuary', above the stalls containing spaces for 250 choristers, three gigantic Diatronics LED screens curve around the stage, advertising a roster of events, including water baptism, a movie night and 'Spark', a marriage conference. Information appears on ways to donate via text, online and an app. A black backdrop is punctuated with an array of small white lights, echoing a celestial body. At a midpoint on the floor, a raised platform houses high definition broadcast cameras with telephoto lenses, connected to the control room in the Media Suite on the fifth floor. Rows of rigging, vast subwoofers and amps sit ready to project the voice of the Pastor when he takes the stage. Below, volunteers with badges stationed at fire exits stand ready to welcome and assist. The gridded areas of seating form curved sight lines all perspectivally gathered onto the vanishing point where the smiling Pastor will stand. Behind this centre point, upon which the cameras are trained for broadcast, an 11 foot wide golden sculpture of the globe slowly rotates. The congregation rises steeply around this spherical configuration, the multiple bodies enclosed within a fabulous construction. Soon, the lights will blaze across the auditorium and the crowd will rise to their feet. The speakers, channelling powerful upbeat anthems, will cause the floor to tremble and produce a rhythmic vibration inside your chest. A collective upsurge of feeling will swell as the congregants sing, dance and lift their hands. You will hear repeatedly that