I view the creative space as an in-between space, between consciousness and the unconscious, between reality and mystery. I believe that no serious artwork can be produced without a personal struggle with one’s own daemon.
What started as creative experimentation with the psyche eventually culminated in the art exhibition at the Irma Stern Museum, Cape Town. The books, The Old Woman and the Moon and Die Zebravis, were published simultaneously. This in turn developed into the workshop, Creativity and the Inner Other. In this workshop I share with others this process of communicating with the inner world through creative work of all kinds, a form of active imagination. In Backstory I follow the thread of deeper meaning as it meanders across 25 years.
Read the article by the CG Jung Foundation, New York, in Quadrant magazine 2020.
A Bird’s Eye-view of South African Art, Amanda Botha in DeKat 2016
In Wilna van der Walt’s work she gives expression to the inner consciousness of healing powers that find expression in the creative fervency. Here it has to do with the activation of the practice of art to stimulate the subconscious to find expression in an image and a striving for purification. The exhibition, The old woman and the Moon, in the Irma Stern Museum in Rosebank, Cape Town, represents the symbolic journey of the artist, which takes her along uncharted paths within the Jungian context. She opens herself to tell her story on canvas within the rich chaos of inner perceptions.
Her palette becomes the medium and her canvas the reportage of her psychic journey, and the answer to her continuous inner dialogue. Like the writer Milan Kundera, she finds in her work ‘the unbearable lightness’, and she can turn her ‘sunflowers’ to the light like Vincent van Gogh. Each of these paintings has its own life – a part of the greater puzzle of truths that form part of a wider cosmic understanding.
Read Amanda’s opening words at the Irma Stern Museum.
Exhibitions
2016: The Old Woman and the Moon, Irma Stern Museum, Cape Town
2017: Dream Now, Dream Not, group exhibition, The Cape Gallery
2018: Stories Of A Life, Breytenbach Centre, Wellington
2018: Surface and Interface, group exhibition, The Cape Gallery
2019: To Dream the Impossible Dream, group exhibition, The Cape Gallery
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