Pickering has produced a range of writing from book length-works to performance scripts, prose-poetry, scholarly journal articles and creative-critical book chapters. Her book-length work ‘There is a Miracle in Your Mouth’ (publisher tbc) was shortlisted for the Prototype Prize for writing at the intersection of literary and artistic forms. Feedback from the judging panel included ‘(an) Intelligent and complex comingling of materialism and the sacred’ (award-winning novelist Tom McCarthy), ‘one of (the) outstanding works in this category’ (Turner prize-winning artist and Professor of Art Elizabeth Price), ‘as a work built from site-based performances, this has power’ (award-winning poet Bhanu Kapil). Pickering is currently working on further research into St Julian of Norwich toward a text and performance for a group exhibition titled The Rule: Shaping Lives Medieval and Modern, to be held at the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts in Norwich (March-June 2026) curated by Dr Jessica Barker and Dr Ed Krčma. Performance scripts can be found linked in the ‘WORK’ section of this website, the following is a selection of other texts:
Never At Sea
Creative-critical text written to accompany Kate McMillan’s solo exhibition at St Mary Le Strand Church, focussing on climate change and migration (2023).
Link to Kate McMillan’s website.
Image: St Mary Le Strand, London (2023), Kate Pickering.
Lakewood Megachurch:
Bodily Dis/Orientations in a Climate of Belief
PhD thesis, completed in the Art and Visual Cultures Departments at Goldsmiths, University of London, 2023.
Image: Hurricane Harvey satellite image, wikicommons attribution: SSEC/CIMSS, University of Wisconsin–Madison.
There is a Miracle in Your Mouth: Writing a Body of Belief
Book section/ chapter in ‘Fieldwork for Future Ecologies: Radical Practice for Art and Art-based Research’, eds. Bridget Crone, Sam Nightingale and Polly Stanton, published by Onomatopee (2022).
Expanding Religious Crowds: Containment and Openness in the American Megachurch
Journal article in Crowd(ed) Futures Special issue of Coils of the Serpent Journal for the Study of Contemporary Power, issue 7 ‘Crowd(ed) Futures’, eds. Mark Schmitt and Solvejg Nitzke, 2020.
Link to ‘Crowd(ed) Futures’, issue 7.
Image: Lakewood Church worship service, (2019), Kate Pickering.
Roe v. Wade and the rise of the Christian Right
Symposium presentation in the early stages of my PhD research.
Image: Erik Drost, CC BY 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons.
Calculus
Prose-poetry presented for ‘Speaking Through Stones’ exhibition during the Fine Art Research Symposium, St. James Hatcham, Goldsmiths College (2016).
Speaking through Stones
Creative-critical text presented for ‘Speaking through Stones’ exhibition during the Fine Art Research Symposium, St James Hatcham, Goldsmiths (2016).
Image: Loco Steve, CC BY-SA 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons
Ink Sack (For Bridget)
Creative-critical journal article for the Journal of Writing in Creative Practice published by Intellect.
Image: Anna Barham (2013). Double Screen (Not Quite Tonight Jellylike). Production still (detail). Courtesy of the artist.
There is a Miracle in Your Mouth
Hybrid/ experimental book-length work, shortlisted for the Prototype Prize. ‘There is a Miracle in Your Mouth’ moves between the dis/believing body of an exvangelical, a spectacular Texan evangelical megachurch caught in the midst of a hurricane and a fourteenth century anchorite cell in which St Julian of Norwich is permanently enclosed (publisher tbc).
Image: Cloud-Breath, 2022, Kate Pickering. Drawing including photograph of a Pyura Chilensis by Arvid Puschnig, available at: https://futurism.com/pyura-chilensis-meet-living-rock
Weird Atmospheres and Biblical Floods: The Inundation of the American Megachurch
Book section/ chapter in ‘Imagining the Apolcalypse: Art and the End Times’, eds. Edwin Coomasaru and Theresa Deichert, published by Courtauld Books Online (2022).
Plot Holes
Prose-poetry in ‘Corroding the Now’, eds. Francis-Gene Rowe, Stephen Mooney and Richard Parker.
The Fat Trunk of the Baobab
Creative-critical journal article for ‘KONESH’, Issue 1: Scale, eds. Saba Zavarei, Vanessa Lehamnn, Louise Rondel, 2020.
Bowels of Steel
Creative-critical PhD research presentation in early stages of PhD.
Image: photograph of a Pyura Chilensis by Arvid Puschnig, available at: https://futurism.com/pyura-chilensis-meet-living-rock
PhD proposal
PhD proposal to the Arts and Humanities Research Council (CHASE/ AHRC)
‘Megachurch Materiality in a Post-Truth Era: Bodily Dis/Orientation and Belief’
Resulted in a full scholarship for the remainder of the PhD.
Image: Lakewood Church worship service, (2019), Kate Pickering.