CLASS DESCRIPTION
In the context of renewed interest in written accounts of women’s mystical experience, artist and writer Dr Kate Pickering will share her ongoing research into the life and visions of Julian of Norwich. St Julian was a fourteenth century anchorite (a type of religious recluse) who transcribed a series of visions of Christ whilst suffering from a serious illness, becoming the first women published in the English language.
Despite the risks of excommunication and accusations of heresy, St Julian’s interpretation of her visions challenged the accepted theology of her day. Seen through a twenty-first century lens, her accounts can be read as insistently and powerfully proto-feminist, a challenge to the silencing and patriarchal restrictions on women both medieval and modern. In ‘Revelations of Divine Love’, she asserts the divine oneness of all things, God as a forgiving mother and the visceral, feminine body as a space of sacred connection to God. In her writing, she attempts to apply coherent meaning to the alterity of mystical experience, and through her ordering and interpretation, a compassionate, inclusive and materialist voice emerges.
This lecture will provide an introduction to the life and visionary experience of St Julian, with a focus on the institutional restrictions and rules that she lived with in contrast to the expansive and unruly mystical bodily encounter. Including the perspectives of writers and scholars such as Simon Critchley, Janina Ramirez, Caroline Walker Bynum, Barry Windeatt, Liz Herbert McAvoy, Claire Gilbert among others, Pickering will read from her own writing, a selection of Julian’s visions and detail her recent site-based performance works that draws on Julian’s legacy to create rituals that are feminist, decolonial and queer, reorienting participants toward an animate world.
ABOUT OUR LECTURER
Dr Kate Pickering (she/ her) is a London-based artist, writer, and associate lecturer in Fine Art at Goldsmiths and Kingston School of Art. Pickering researches the entanglements of sacred sites and bodies through writing, performance, making and drawing. She is interested in how contemporary artists are taking up devotional cultures and practices, performative rituals, vocalisation and story-telling to produce decolonial, feminist, queer and ecologically-oriented worlds. Her research into Julian of Norwich as a proto eco-feminist figure within Christian mystical tradition will inform new work for a group exhibition titled ‘Living by the Rule: Contemporary Meets Medieval’ at the Sainsbury Centre, Norwich (2026). 'There is a Miracle in Your Mouth', an experimental non-fiction book based on her research, was shortlisted for the Prototype Prize for writing at the intersection of literary and artistic forms and is in development with Tenement Press. Recent work includes the curation of a live performance event ‘Ritual/Bodies’ at St Pancras Church (London, 2024); a site-based performance lecture that drew on the Catholic history of the Jan van Eyck Academy and its local ecologies (Maastricht, 2023); a writing commission for Kate McMillan’s exhibition ‘Never at Sea’ focussing on climate change and migration at St Mary Le Strand Church (London, 2023).
INSTAGRAM: @writing_a_body_of_belief
WEBSITE: https://kate-pickering.com/
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