Urthona – Buddhism & art

Kate Boucher uses charcoal to evoke liminal transition zones, skies at dawn and dusk, coasts and mountains in shifting atmospheres of wind and cloudscape. Each of her landscapes is an intense study of a particular mood, not a portrait of one moment or scene, but a response to the essential qualities inherent in a time and place based in many different angles of engagement. These studies arise from a deeply sensitive awareness of the emotional energies evoked by wide open landscapes. The working with soft layers of charcoal, with many stages of rubbing and melding results in a subtle and fluid interplay of form and movement.

It was a privilege to see Kate at work recently when she had a residence at the excellent Fen Ditton Gallery, Cambridgeshire, just a couple of miles walk by the river meadows from my house. I was entranced to see scenes from nearby fields, walked a thousand times and hardly seen, transformed into essentials of light, space and air.

Working with wide open fenland skies was something of a new departure for Kate, but she seemed to respond very quickly to that sense of infinity in the sky with dark earth shades below one’s feet. That being grounded and infinitely expanded at the same time, which is so characteristic of the fens. More often she is based in a Wales, and engages with the boundary zones of coasts and mountain slopes, but similarly with a strong sense of the essential fluidity of these places.

More images and details of exhibitions on her website: KateBoucher.com

Kate’s Instagram Page

Waterlight is a film project inspired by a chalk stream in Cambridgeshire, the Mel, which runs between the villages of Melbourn and Shepreth. Waterlight began as a collaboration between poet and writer Clare Crossman and James Murray-White. The project team grew to include local expert Bruce Huett and filmmaker Nigel Kinnings.

Bruce Huett will appear in Urthona 36, due out summer 2022. He writes about spiritual inspiration from landscape and draws on his experience of our local chalk streams as well as eco-spiritual shamanic projects in the Mendips not to mention his travels in central Asia and Tibet, regions where water is deeply venerated and often considered to inhabited by gods and nature spirits.

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Urthona recently visited the Mel and was pleased to see that the hard work undertaken by many volunteers is still in place. The stream runs pure and cold and the meander banks have been reinforced with ecologically sensitive areas fenced off.

Ratnagarbha, the editor, took a set of seven photographs on a Canon EOS M100, a bit of tweaking in Lightroom brought out the inherent colours although it was a cold, overcast winter morning. You can see a little of the peculiar cold purity, slightly misted by the chalk content of the water which remains at the same temperature of ten degrees above freezing the whole year round as the water comes from deep under the earth and has been filtered for years through chalk strata before it emerges.

But this is only to draw attention to the movie which is wonderful evocation of a particular kind of eco system that is under threat from over extraction by water companies – pure chalk streams are very rare world wide and England has a large proportion of the surviving examples. The movie features interviews with local people who live along the stream, beautiful photography and an evocative poetic commentary by local poet Clare Crossman who sadly passed away recently.

Watch a trailer, buy the video or download and read more about the project here:

Cowboy Meditation Primer – poetry sequence by Mary McCray

(Taster  from Urthona issue 35 ‘American Zen’ – order from Urthona Shop above)

A unique sequence of poems in which the hard lives and gritty adventures of cowboys on the trails of 19th Century New Mexico are combined with Buddhist Wisdom.