The First Twenty-Four Hours

Writing my research proposal for my Ph.D. broke open some new paintings.

**Trigger Warning** mentions of rape and sexual violence follow

In the last three weeks, after working on my research proposal for over a year and a half, I changed my subject to Collecting Rape: Cataloguing and responding to every item in the National Gallery and Archives which takes rape as its subject from a safe and theoretical question "How art translates space into sense and language."

The new subject of my research proposal is one I have always felt passionately about, and though in the past I have often tried to pull away from it, my work is always connected to violence against women and the political and social dynamics of sex as a means of power and control over women's bodies.

In the last two years since leaving the RCA, I re-entered therapy, and re-entered school (to pay for my studio). I'm currently in an MA Creative Writing program in Kingston. Taking courses on subjects like Sex and text and Trauma and justice had an incredible and immediate impact on my life, my practice, my mental health, and my application to Ruskin. 

This topic change had been percolating and insisting on itself, but I had been shoving it away. It finally happened at the eleventh hour after seeing the play Ulster American by David Ireland which runs through the end of January 2024 in London and which I highly recommend. 

Until I saw this play, read these books, did this writing, and looked a lot at this artwork in this order, I didn't have the language or the wherewithal to reveal the multiple rapes which happened to me when I was very young as possible source imagery for me to work from. Though I have always wanted to mine these memories as a place from which I might make work, I did not know how to look at the events, let alone work with them, talk about them, reveal them, or deal with them without making them trauma therapy, art therapy, without wanting the object to explain to the viewer: hey this happened to me, this is what it feels like to be me. Most of the work I have been doing over the last two years has to do with gaining critical distance so I am not asking my art to "speak" for me, but just to come into existence as its own thing in response to something else, and speak however it speaks. 

So something really special has happened: I'm now looking straight at these memories with curiosity, like a detective. I knew as I approached the subject of collecting rape in art, and as I sat in front of exquisite images of rape in the National Gallery, that there was a lifetime of work to do here because my experience is not unique. Stories of rape pervade society and always have: they are instructional, and they help the genders understand their social positions, and the dangers inherent to those positions. 

This work, I believe, will, simply by collating the collection of rape-related materials in the National Gallery, isolate a very clear signal being sent from this work onto us. Once all of this suddenly slotted into place in my head, I had two weeks and a new burning understanding. I could not submit my initial proposal to Ruskin. I withdrew my proposal paperwork and kept the rest of the completed application live. 

To prepare to completely re-write my proposal, I locked down my calendar and shut myself in my studio. My friends and family rallied around me by giving me total silence, space, and safety as I examined my starting place: to understand how to write my proposal for all, I had to understand my own singular rape experience clearly. I built a calendar that gave me a full day of reflection before the deadline, I wanted to be able to disappear into the work completely knowing my calendar had my back, and knowing I could see the work and the writing from a place of reflection before I sent it in.

I produced three paintings, completely new, a total evolution from what I've done before, one of which is still in progress. The work was emotionally exhausting and thrilling at the same time. I found my initial composition in the dissociated memory of the aftermath of the rapes. During the painting cycle, I realized that all three of these events occurred within 24 hours, on or around my thirteenth birthday. I had many personal understandings along the way: making the paintings was, indeed, therapeutic. But the work wasn't for that purpose, nor did it stop there. The image arose, and became an act of care and repair: there she was, and I loved her.

I painted these scenes with an affection I did not know I could have for young me: it was an incredible thing, not to hate her, the me of the past, or to be ashamed of her, or to misunderstand what had happened and why it had happened. I drew up a sepia underdrawing like Rubens, I toned up a value scale like Rembrandt, I rendered my fractured self, left in the aftermath, and loved painting her like I loved looking at the Rape of Europa: with an almost spiritual vibration of passion and care. A very odd thing happened to the image as I painted something that should be violent and desolate with love, some strange dissonance made the image do something new for me. Rather than being ashamed of a record of an event, narratively executed, I had something I wasn't sure I could ever show anyone, which was changing my understanding of what a painting could be, could do. 

Across my studio are strewn reference paintings of rapes, of wars, of soldiery, of horses storming gates, and massacres of innocents. These pieces we all know so well, the majority from Rubens and Titian, pieces I've stared at in person in the Wallace Collection and the National Gallery, informed my mark making, rather than obliterating the loving image I'd painted below, I felt an act of liberating, of joining my memory - of it joining hands with the marks which have entered my lexicon from so much looking. Now, these images of my own rape feel woven like a tapestry into the fabric of rape in art history: the question of why we paint these things and why we find them beautiful bubbling up through centuries of shared experience. Mine is just another body lying under a bush in the semi-light. I could be anybody. I could be Susanna. 

I emerged from this intensity never exhausted: now, in a newly healthy body, unafraid to look squarely at myself as a resource, but understanding what I can do with paint, not as a language to be decoded but as a happening, a weaving, a suturing, a connecting to the past and a catapult into a clearer future, I stayed in the studio until midnight almost every night and was back before the sun came up every morning. I re-wrote the proposal while working on the paintings, I spoke to almost no one. I followed my mesmerization work routine: I woke without an alarm in the dark, padded down stairs and brought my coffee back up into bed, where I read the Guardian in silence as I woke up. I don’t check texts or emails when I’m working until the apointed time, I let my mind come on-line in this very specific way.

The events of the day are informing my work: soldiery is marching across not only my studio floor, but Gaza, Ukraine, Sudan, so many places. And rape is as always, a very affective tool of war.

I was having little cascading anxiety attacks, the old voice wondering if I was good enough or smart enough or what about being likable - this research topic would brand me forever as a - what? Who cares? Get to work - this litany would fire off every time I just opened my application, and again as I scrolled or tried to read it: It took everything I had to march my way through it.

I have been liaising with Oxford's disability coordinator, because I now have been assessed for ADHD along with Dyslexia, and the UK is great at integrating help for neurodiverse folks. I knew my biggest obstacle would be a careless error: I tried to ensure I could not make a mistake. Rather than submitting early (my old mountaineering partner used to call me “Ready, Fire, Aim” so I was attempting to be slow, thorough, and sure…) I waited, double-checking every single thing I uploaded and confirming it was complete with Susanne, the coordinator. The application itself is confusing and daunting, as it should be. I felt I was up to the challenge, and unafraid to ask for (some) of the help I needed. 

I have help in my regular life with my calendar because I struggle with it when it matters most. It is a best practice for me to have someone without ADHD or dyslexia double-check my calendar and help me make sure I know what day it is and how many hours I have until my next deadline. I did not ask for this kind of backup with my Ruskin application. I somehow didn't feel like it was right. I should be able to do this on my own. Can you guess what lesson I learned in this whole thing, what the moral of this story is? 

It has been a wonderful experience, and I hope to be considered for an interview at some point. It was scarier than anything I have done, including planning and executing any mountain summit, it was harder and scarier than trying out for the National Alpine Team, harder and scarier than racing a motorcycle at the Las Vegas Motor Speedway. 

It was also one of the most intense periods of growth personally and artistically I have ever experienced, and no matter what happens, I'm very proud of my proposal, and the new direction the painting is taking, and I'm excited for the future.

I was proud of the engineering of my production/application calendar, I built time in allowing me days to upload things as I finished them, with extra days for proofreading and double checking in this last week. The 5th of Jan was the last day applications closing at 12.

I started the day relaxed, knowing today I would present everything I'd been working so hard on for the last four years in one 977-word package. I continued my mesmerization: coffee in the dark followed by morning yoga, and a bit of bodywork on my spinal injury, and then I went to the studio to upload the final images we re-shot of the work. I hoped to submit by 5 pm, seven hours before the midnight deadline, relaxed and happy. 

Still too close, still the day of, but at least not in a crushing hurry, this last day would be exciting and relaxed: spit and polish: the tab has been open on my desktop since applications opened in September, I could have submitted it days ago - but I didn't, because I wanted to make sure I put in a compelling argument. I had come to really, really want this. I had come to believe in this. 

And so it is with great sorrow that I admit to you that the deadline was indeed 12 pm. PM. Noon. Not midnight. I made a simple mistake, and one I could have avoided, and it means I won't be able to apply to Ruskin until next September. 

I think due to the nature of the new proposal, lots of things were heightened and re-awakened, and my sense of anxiety around hitting the details was acute as I worked closely with these old memories and isolated myself (happily) in my work... I've not experienced anxiety like this before. I was so focused on getting all the application components right it did not occur to me that I may have gotten the deadline wrong, and I didn't double-check it, though this is the kind of obstacle we do have control over. And I did hear my mind asking me to double-check it and asking me to ask for help to make sure it was right.

I wanted to say to all of you who helped me so much: I'm sorry. When I realized it had happened, I immediately emailed the disability support coordinator from Oxford, who is incredibly kind, however, there is nothing they can do, the graduate portal is the only way to submit. I sent it in by email to her when I asked, just as complete as it had been the day before, and the day before that, only a few hours after the deadline closed, but alas - I missed it.

As Olivia, who was working just as hard as I was in the background reworking my website for submission day, said when I told her: If it was the 80s, we'd hop in the car and drive to Oxford and stuff it under the door anyway. For a hot moment I could see us stuffing a brown manila envelope under a fusty school door, but it's not the 80s, and we have to hit our deadlines, and those deadlines slam shut on an electronic timer now.

Aside from howling disappointment that I'd missed it, my only real sorrow was in having to tell the people I respect the most in my field, who have supported me so much, believed in me, written recommendations, and helped me work through my proposals in several different forms, that I made this mistake. I'm so grateful for so much that happened that the disappointment is magnified spectacularly.

I completed my application to my second school of choice, Leeds, yesterday, so all is not lost. It may, after all of this, be a better fit for me anyway (should I get in).

But I had seen silly old Cathy, you know, 13-year-old me, not lying under a bush after all, but riding a bicycle around the sun-dappled pavements of Oxford - a place I never dared to picture her approaching, let alone belonging, before. Now, I think she’s free to ride that bicycle wherever the fuck she wants to go.

The painting is still flowing. There is research to be done.

You can see the paintings at katehowe.com/portfolio