Irma Stern Museum Exhibition

Amanda Botha at the Irma Stern Museum Exhibition, Cape Town 2016

Creativity has everything to do with finding your own voice, of discovering the vein of gold that runs in your own life.

This exhibition gives shape to Van der Walt’s symbolic journey on unchartered paths, an expedition of the shards and fragments of her wounded soul depicted on canvas. A journey of 25 years took her deep into herself, allowing her subconscious interaction with her imagination to convey messages and stimuli onto canvas by way of art.

Van der Walt made herself vulnerable in relating her story on canvas, harvesting from the fertile turmoil of her inner awareness. She reacted to the stimulus and patiently waited for its evolvement, finding in herself the confidence to enter into the unknown inner world. Her palette becomes the medium, her canvas the report of her psychological journey, the answer to her continuous conversation with herself.

She did not think of her work as art, but rather as images coming into being as a result of an inner dialogue creating meaning for her. Each of these images has a life of its own, part of a larger puzzle of truths, a larger cosmic concept. This is the essential meaning of visual art, the reason why artists work on canvas, others with chisels, to bring form into existence.

The external reflection of her inner world on canvas, with its imperfections, became recognizable and allowed her acceptance and meaningful engagement with day to day living. She could find ‘the unbearable lightness of being’ in her work, like the writer Milan Kundera, and like Vincent van Gogh she could turn her ‘sunflowers’ to the light.

Amanda Botha, Art Journalist and Writer