SWISS psychiatrist Carl Jung once said, “if you don’t answer to your creativity, it will kill you”, or words to that effect.

Artist and teacher Kate Walters felt that tug, sacrificing her post as head of a Dorset school’s sixth art department to pursue her own artistic urges full time.

“I told the school my decision on January 13 1997; I adored all my students, they adored me, and I cried every day for six months before leaving, thinking what am I doing? I was on my own, but I knew that that my need to paint was draining me. You can feel it eating you up and working against you,” says Kate, whose debut York exhibition, A World Revealed, is running at the New School House Gallery, Peasholme Green, until April 26.

Yet she might never have made that career conversion.

“When I left Dorset in my little ancient Peugeot 205 with Pusskin, my Burmese cat, and Jacob, my son, all the way as far as Exeter I felt pulled back to Dorset, but after that I felt a sense of joy, though also terror,” says Kate.

“My parents thought I was completely off my rocker but at least they did come and help me move.”

Kate chose Penzance as her destination.

“I knew I had to move to Cornwall to a place beginning with ‘P’. I’d first gone to Cornwall in 1993 and fallen in love with the heritage and wildness of the place, at Zennor, which DH Lawrence had loved too and Cornwall absolutely put a spell on me.”

That spell remains unbroken.

There were two calling cards that made her answer her desire to paint. “I’d had a number of dreams about my artwork, and was getting up at five o’clock in the morning to paint, before teaching all day and I had a young boy to look after as a single mother. I ended up getting shingles from working too much and that was an epiphany,” Kate says.

“I also read Clarissa Pinkola Estes’ book Women Who Run With The Wolves [Contacting The Power Of The Wild Woman], written in that typically c**p American style, but it had such an impact that two weeks later I resigned from the school.”

Part-time tutoring in Penzance “finished me with teaching for good”, says Kate, although she still does workshops for adults, but art has dominated her life for the past 16 years.

She draws on aspects of myth, shamanism, Jungian collective unconscious and lucid dreaming in her “unashamedly mystical and uncompromisingly female art”, as School House gallery co-owner Robert Teed describes it.

“She explores feelings around the body – her own body and animal bodies – and how she learns about the world through all her senses,” he says.

Kate’s artistic practice involves “working with the living net of creation that I feel extends to all species and all phenomena”. “My ultimate pursuit is to find the voice of the cells of the body that resonate with other people’s cells,which is what Jung called ‘the collective unconscious’,” she says.

“My work is very bodily, but it’s not only the body but also the body we can’t see and the world we can’t see or can only see in certain situations, like dreams or daydreams possibly, though I never paint my dreams.”

Explaining that distinction further, she says: “For many years, I’ve experienced vivid and instructive dreams. These serve as a commentary and guide to my waking world and to my work as an artist.

If I’m in doubt about a certain path, they will give me pointers or warnings.”

Kate favours watercolour, gum arabic and graphite drawing as media on a gesso-prepared surface that is smooth yet durable, while the watercolour is fluid, rapid, delicate and easily changed. “It’s a responsive, living, feminine medium; perfect for my task,” she says.

“I’m interested in asking for the vision, strength and perceptive gifts of various animals and plants; for example, climbing inside the belly of a horse one can ask to be ‘cooked’ by the inward heat, and gain the gift of learning the steady focus for this life.”

Kate, you may need to elucidate what being “cooked by the inward heat of a horse” means in layman’s terms. “I haven’t been eaten by a horse, but I’ve had several horses, starting saving money for my first at ten, cleaning pub loos,” she says.

“I had my second horse Phaedra for 16 years and she’d been with me half my life when she died.

She taught me about motherhood, courage, love, loyalty, as she bred me four lovely foals, and she had a kind of feminine intelligence as well as being a warrioress, who could look after herself.”

Horses and another of Kate’s favourite animals, whippets, feature in her work, and she also is inspired by her passion for hill walks. “I love being on the tops of mountains, where you can see huge hares and eagles.

“These are fine but lonely places; no one goes there, much. You feel as if you can step into another world, and not come back. I love the feeling of balance, of being on the edge of something.”

What lies next for Kate after her York debut? “I would love to do a residency at School House and Holy Trinity, such a beautiful church in Goodramgate,” she says.

Watch this space.

Kate Walters will give a talk on her exhibition at the New School House Gallery on April 26 at 2pm; everyone welcome. She will hold a drawing workshop on April 25 from 10am to 2pm; places cost £45 each and can be booked by emailing mail@schoolhousegallery.co.uk