About

From the start I was fascinated by the creative process itself, by the process of projecting and giving shape to unconscious content, and interacting with something that responds to my actions. I learned that the unconscious will help one, because it wants to, if approached in the right way.

This process became an ongoing inner dialogue which enriched and contained me consciously. To me the image always had to serve the psyche’s message. Over the course of many years, it linked separate images, or messages, to tell its own story.

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. In Images I follow the thread of deeper meaning as it meanders across 25 years.

It has always been imperative to me to share this process of a conscious dialogue with my deeper self with others. In the work of CG Jung, the Swiss psychiatrist, I found confirmation of my experience. This led in 2018 to my creative workshop, Creativity and the Inner Other, now freely available here.

In 2020 the CG Jung Foundation of New York published an article on my work in Quadrant magazine. You can read about it here.

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 here.