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Enclosed Writing: A Crypt Residency
July 21-10:30 am - July 26-5:00 pm
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21-26 July 2025
Opening times:
Mon 21 July: 10.30am-5pm
Tuesday 22 July: 10.30am-5pm
Weds 23 July: 10.30am-5pm
Thurs 24 July: 1pm-5pm
Fri 25 July: 10.30-2pm
Sat 26 July: 10.30am-5pm
From 21-26 July, artist and writer Kate Pickering will take up an anchoritic residency within the damp walls of the Crypt Gallery underneath St Pancras Church. Extending her research into fourteenth century anchorite, mystic and writer Julian of Norwich, Pickering will sequester herself, channelling the practice of Julian’s enclosure on the side of a church. Echoing Julian’s circular writing and re-writing in her attempts to glean coherent meaning from the derangements of visionary experience, Pickering will rework her book in progress ‘There is a Miracle in Your Mouth’, and create new drawings based on the pages of medieval manuscripts and their notations and marginalia.
Bio
Kate Pickering is a London-based artist, writer, lecturer in Fine Art Critical Studies at Kingston School of Art, and associate lecturer in Fine Art at Goldsmiths. She researches the entanglements of ecological bodies and sacred sites through scholarly writing, creative-critical texts and performance. Pickering completed an AHRC scholarship PhD at Goldsmiths (2023) examining how the immersive story-world of North America’s largest megachurch acts as a ‘total work of art’ in a broader context of white nationalism, climate crisis, End Times obsession and climate change denialism. Forthcoming is a performance for the exhibition ‘The Rule: Shaping Lives, Medieval and Modern’ at the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts, Norwich (2026). Recent work includes 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 solo exhibition ‘Never at Sea’ focussing on climate change and migration at St Mary Le Strand Church (London, 2023); and the curation of ‘Ritual/Bodies’, a live performance event at St Pancras Church, exploring bodily representations within Christian tradition (London, 2024). Her writing has been published by Copy Press, Veer Books and EROS Journal amongst others. Pickering co-runs Peer Sessions, a crit group for artists, and is a trustee for mental health charity Arts Network London.
Image Credit: Manuela Barczewski