Welcome...

... a little bit about me and my creative journey

Mar 02, 2025

Hello dear reader,

Welcome to my Substack page, I’m thrilled to bits that you’re here.

I thought it only polite that I should introduce myself properly - I intend to write quite intimately about my path into the Arts, as well as my somewhat circuitous quest for spiritual growth and enlightenment - and this introduction is a kind of ‘potted history’ of my journey thus far, it roughly indicates the tone & topics that you can expect from this page going forwards, and hopefully will whet the ol’ whistle for what’s to come… So here we go, a little bit about me and my journey:

I’m Harriet Grace Catchpole - a portrait artist & illustrator based in the South East of England. I didn’t always know I was an artist - it took me a very long time to find my vocation, and I was in creative crisis for what felt like an eternity -

Initially as a model (I never progressed past sporadic, cheesy-grin commercial jobs and narrowly avoided presenting on QVC shopping channel)… Then I trained as an actor (I did some cool indie films and a sci-fi TV pilot (alongside Taron Edgerton & Anthony Head1) but was not thick-skinned enough to endure the relentless conveyor belt of rejection)… Later I worked as a medical roleplayer, training medical students in communication skills (sometimes I pretended to have cancer, other times vaginal thrush; there was never a dull moment)…

There was an array of inexplicable jobs in between - giving dessert samples out at London Underground stations dressed in a fluorescent lycra catsuit and wig (the hue of the wig was so bright it attracted a swarm of flies and I had to shudder my head like a horse every few seconds to prevent them landing on me)… I conducted hysterical children into tremulous crescendos of ‘let it go, let it gooo’ at Frozen-themed Disney parties… I intermittently wiped sweat off the glass panes during televised squash tournaments… I temped at a trendy media company where a directorial fist-fight broke out as the other staff members nonchalantly tapped at their excel spreadsheets… and, during a particularly unharnessed moment in the proceedings, I travelled to Romania in a van with a troupe of clowns and theatrical vagabonds to perform in clowning shows.

I know. Yes, really I KNOW.

It was totally wild, and I just couldn't find my place during this time. I sensed I had good creative seed and yet I (clearly) had no idea where to plant it. Eventually, I moved back to my hometown and embarked on an MA in Fine Art but had to drop out half-way through due to debilitating chronic fatigue.

At this point, exhausted and frequently struggling to leave the house, I started drawing charcoal portraits of artists I loved. For no reason really - just an act of therapeutic expression to keep me sane. I had recently joined a collective, and we were putting on art shows, so I put a handful of the portraits into one.

I was surprised at the positive feedback I got and, shortly after the show, I received my first two commission requests… At fucking last!… Something clicked, and I knew that I was finally heading in the right direction. (Isn’t it funny how when we stop trying to get arrested, we sometimes make the space for things to flood right in…).

My path to self-discovery through spirituality and religion took a similarly confusing, and rather snaky, trajectory also.

I cannot lie, my initial interest in otherworldliness and things outside of the 3D realm, took the form of escapism and a persistent impulse to annihilate myself out of the current reality.

I guess it all started when I won a huge bottle of gin in the tombola at a school fund-raising event when I was eleven. ‘Oh goodness, you are going to give that to your parents aren’t you?!’ said a concerned looking teacher as I hefted the bottle off the table. ‘Of course, Mrs Smith!!’2 I nodded vigourously, as I scuttled off with the booty to find my friends and plan when we might start guzzling it.

Well, here’s roughly how it panned out over the forthcoming years:

Lambrini and Marlboro Lights in the park… cheap noxious vodka outside the heavy metal club… sticky pints of snake-bite as mosh-pit fuel… crudely rolled spliffs with the roach all soggy and sticking to our lips…

This progressed to raves in grotty clubs where condensation dripped from the ceiling… raves in fields that took two hours to get to… raves consisting of ten people around one van with a generator… fancy raves with skinny girls and posh boys and cocaine…

We huffed whippets on the backseat of a friend of a friend’s Mazda… lines off the sweaty toilet cistern in the old man pub… speed off Amy’s debit card… ketamine off my desk at the staff party… wraps of methadrone passed under the toilet door smashed into claggy little lines and, well… pretty much anything that was going for as long as it was going… until…

It all became a bit too much.

I developed a persistent lightheadedness and a pain behind my eyes that I just couldn’t shake. Even more alarmingly, I started seeing apparitions of dead people in the house I had just moved into with my actor pals, a stone’s throw from the screaming crossroads of Manor House, in London. It began after a messy Ketamine bender and I presumed it would just wear off, but weeks and months later I still couldn’t shirk the heavy, vacuous figures. A continual dark, snaking energy wisped around me and when I looked at people’s faces, or glanced at framed photographs of family and friends, their eyes glinted and rippled with a sinister demonic glare.

I found myself staring with wide bloodshot eyes in the mirror; I didn’t know what I had done. I had always been highly sensitive since I was a child, but something had happened. I seemed to have opened my energy, but what exactly had I let in? I was pretty sure I was accessing a spiritual realm but had definitely gone about it in, unarguably, the wrong way.

I had always been open minded and a self-professed ‘seeker’ and I believed wholeheartedly in something… beyond. What’s more, I had felt plagued by my sensitivity and complete inability to not feel abso-fucking-lutely everything, including other people’s unspoken emotions. Perhaps that was why I had enjoyed taking drugs so much - they gave me the kind of ‘skin’ that I had always felt I was lacking.

I started to consider that I might be able to cultivate my sensitivities and maybe even steer this newfound extra-sensory bent towards a higher vibration - channel it in a healthy way rather than passively allowing it to haunt me in such a bizarre and oppressive manner. If I did so, I wondered what I might access then… I certainly was curious as to why this was all happening; the mechanics, the energetics of it.

So I stopped taking drugs, not least because of the aforementioned ‘seeing dead people thing’ but I had also developed an array of chronic health issues which were seriously impeding my energy. And so I determined to embark on a brand new quest towards health and spirituality - (naturally with the same fervour and unbridled tenacity that I had lent to taking drugs, oh but of course…).

I got straight to work - I took a two hour round-trip across London every week to do Zen meditation but found it too stark, too hard on my back; sitting robed, wordless and upright for 90 minute long stretches… I popped along to New Age meet-ups but found the energy sickly and overfamiliar; too much unsolicited shoulder rubbing and cloying eye contact with strangers wearing rainbow jumpers. No, I wanted more, not fewer, boundaries thanks all the same… I hungrily traversed the landscape of the ‘spiritual scene’ through books and podcasts and social media, imbibing everything that I could. I mostly found it unsatisfying and ungrounded; ‘just think feel-good thoughts!!’ was a recurrent slogan, but didn’t cut the mustard for me - it suggested a lofty and avoidant attitude and I was always left with the sense that some crucial aspect of the self was being bypassed…

I started to make progress when I discovered a Taoist energy arts class - at this point I was in my early 20s and was pining for respite and a community away from drama school where I spent the vast majority of my waking hours (wearing all black and pretending to be a meerkat or a tree or making myself cry on demand).

In the Taoist classes, I used Chi Gung and Nei Gung as a way to ground my energy back into my body and work with my nervous system in a calm, centring way. I partook in lengthy sitting and standing meditation retreats, this time I felt refreshed and invigorated after, and I gradually developed a sense of ownership and autonomy over my energy field and personhood. That is until my teacher, who had taken a shine to me, who took me out for teas and coffees and cake, and treated me as a kind of under-developed pygmalion figure; always nit picking my behaviour and correcting my opinions, at first affectionately, with a sense of generosity and fatherliness - ‘all in the interests of self improvement!!’ - later as a means of objectification; sending angry, overbearing text messages if I refused his invitations to sleep with him or questioned him on his behaviour.

I trained with another teacher, a bone-fide Taoist lineage master, a portly man in his 50s who was rumoured to have once killed a man with his bare hands in a cage fight. He approached me with a sly grin whilst we were packing up the meditation retreat and asked me to go home with him. I declined and watched him walk to the next woman across and ask her. She accepted.

The quest continued…

I tried Dzogchen and group chanting and Transcendental Meditation… I listened to the dulcet tones of Louise Hay through my headphones at the gym… I read ALL the books on self-acceptance & cutting ties & manifesting your reality… I thought, I journalled, I enquired.

Then I discovered Carl Jung, and the next big penny dropped.

Here was someone who described the world as I saw it - conceptual, elemental and as a deeply alchemical experience. He didn’t evade or bypass the darker aspects of reality, he encouraged his students to delve right into their shadows; to work with, confront, and integrate them. He described having incredible mystical experiences and visions, and if you delve into his Red Book for even an instant, I’m sure you will agree - he really went there. I felt inspired, vindicated, encouraged, and crucially, far less alone in it all.

I took the bits that worked for me from Taoism and combined them with Jungian psychology. This allowed me a map to navigate the world and my inner experiences, and a method of peeling the wrong things away and piecing the right things back together.

On a low level though, a subtle pattern of strain still ran throughout my body - an ongoing sense that I still hadn’t arrived somewhere and so I wasn’t yet ‘home’.

One day, I walked into a Catholic Cathedral, sat down, listened to the organ music and felt… peace. The mass was ending and as the congregants slowly dispersed through the heavy doors I just sat there. I came back a week later and did the same thing. And then again. And again.

Even though I didn’t understand the mass or why exactly I was there, I returned every week as though by compulsion. At this stage it was lockdown and bottles of disinfectant sat on the pews, singing was prohibited due to government guidelines and the mass was dulled down and muffled; recited through masks and two metre wide gaps.

When lockdown lifted I was officially received into the Catholic Church, I stood by the altar, invited God into my spirit, and renounced sin. And I meant it - with every aspect of my being.

To be honest I think I was a ‘closet Catholic’ for years; I always loved the art, the iconography, the sheer maximalism of expression. I avidly read Dante, and debated pertinent ethical issues, and enjoyed the somewhat grave yet moving choral music long before I understood the bones of the religion or even believed in God. I think it’s always been a part of my sensibility.

I can’t stress enough though, dear reader, that none of these things solved my problems. There’s no panacea for discontent, inner turmoil or disconnection from oneself. But certainly what Taoism, and Jung, did was reveal my blindspots and offer instruction and a coherent means to delve into and unravel myself. Attending church gave me space and a sanctified container for spiritual experience. The faith, the community, the physical act of worship, as well as the absorption of biblical myth, enlightened me to humility, surrender and awe. These in turn allowed me to recoup a sense of perspective and groundedness. All of the above brought me back to a core part of myself, which, I now realise with great irony, was there all along.

So that’s my heavily condensed story. In my bleaker moments (namely once a month when my hormones are critically askew) I get quite down about it all - the little man in my head telling me I have made a shambles of it and wasted so much time and energy on this strange, discursive, rambling life path - the haunting catchphrase ‘couldn’t it all have been so much easier?!’ plays on an indignant loop around my head.

But then I realise that I actually really like the person I have become through it all; the muscularity of my newfound character… the depth of perception and empathy which can only be bred through lived experience… not to mention that I have an absolutely knockout arsenal of anecdotes at ever-ready disposal.

So I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s not so much where you end up or what you achieve in life, per say - but more the person you become along the way (which might be the ultimate act of contribution anyway…). And sorry to be so crude and terribly brash and European etc; but we’re all going to end up as literal worm-food, so we may as well prioritise our soul’s journey and development - and lean into the challenging aspects of life in ALL of its messiness and imperfection. There’s no ‘getting it right’ really, just experiencing things and growing, living, being - if we can.

I realise this might sound a bit preachy, but I say all this as much to myself as to you, dear reader, because I spent so long at odds with my being; yearning to escape, desperate to shed my skin a thousand times over and never quite comfortable or satiated. Which is why I embarked on such a mad life-journey to begin with - always seeking and seeking and seeking. And whilst it was deeply uncomfortable feeling so lost for so long, it was really the only path I knew back to myself.

I just popped onto Google to look it up and officially the probability of being born is 1 in 400 trillion. So guys, whatever you end up doing with your life, I think it’s safe to say, we’ve already made the cut. Truthfully, these days I just feel lucky to have been given a chance to be part of it all: We’re all born funny little lumps of clay just waiting to be fashioned by life, and in many ways, our story is all we’ve got.

Okay, this was supposed to be a fairly simple introductory post, but it’s gotten a bit deep and intense which, to be fair, is exactly what you can expect from this page - so great! Job well done, I guess. Start as you mean to go on and all that.

Now for the pesky admin - friends, I won’t at this stage commit to a regular cadence in terms of dropping the articles. I fear I won’t be able to reliably meet a concrete deadline and the recovering people pleaser in me will be riddled with guilt and self-reproach when I inevitably don’t. So I’m going to keep it super-duper loose at the moment.

In terms of what you can expect from this page - well, certainly more of these sorts of long-form articles, although I won’t be wanging on about myself quite so much (this one was heavily auto-biographical in the interests of providing introduction). But I will be wanging on about all sorts of other things - art, literature, psychology, philosophy, the creative process, religion & all things esoteric…

I’m excited to bring back a past project in a newly renovated format. I will be exhuming my ‘Portrait of The Artist’ series, although under a different name and in a new, rather exciting, video format. Yay! (You can read the original series where I spoke to six fascinating creatives about their art practices and drew their portrait here). Keep your eyes peeled on this page to catch all forthcoming episodes when they drop - or better still, add your email address to the subscription box below and they’ll be delivered straight into your inbox.

There’ll no doubt be other juicy bits ‘n’ bobs too - I’m thinking of doing some illustrated book & culture reviews, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves! One thing at a time Harriet…

So that’s the requisite info for now, friends. Thank you for reading thus far and I do hope you’ll stick around and join me for the journey.

Much love,

Harriet x

Let’s stay in touch!

Friends, you can view my artwork and connect with me via the following platforms: Instagram, TikTok & Threads

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