By her own admission Cathy Cullis’s life and practice is rooted in the past. Living in and working from the attic of an 18th-century house in Farnham, Surrey, complete with ‘creaky floors and old beams’, for Cullis this is a specific past, and it’s unquestionably an English one, replete with its own ambience and aesthetic.
Cullis talks a lot about ‘worlds’, seminal pockets of time and lived experience, still sharp, still distinct and sealed-off, protected from the often clumsy, blunting and blurring of history. These worlds are those inhabited by the Brontës, William Blake and other Victorian visionaries, who, also looking back, sought inspiration in the medieval. ‘I feel a connection to their intangible Englishness,’ says Cullis, ‘their transformative ideas.’ Seeing herself as, to some extent, taking on their mantle,…
