“My art addresses long-standing issues pertaining to female body politics, women, femininity, patriarchal oppression and feminism.”
Thelma van Rensburg (born 1969) returned to her artistic practice after many years of detours. In 2008, she completed a BTech Fine Arts degree through Tshwane University of Technology, going on to earn a Masters degree in Fine Arts from the University of Pretoria in 2016. In 2017, she was accepted as a PhD candidate at Plymouth University, and also completed three artist residencies in Berlin and Mexico. Alongside her art practice, Van Rensburg is also trained in and fascinated by psychology. Her areas of continual research include narcissistic abuse, childhood trauma, inner child healing and Jung’s theories on the subconscious and the shadow self.
Van Rensburg’s practice includes collage, drawing, mixed media art, embroidery and fibre art. She is an obsessive creative who creates daily. As an intuitive creative, she works with the medium which best suits her needs at the time. Through her continuing practice of 22 years, she grapples with and
processes the aftermath of severe childhood abuse, inter-relational abuse and complex trauma.
“Through my work, I comment on issues such as the representation of women in the media and its one-sided focus on beauty and desirability. Devices of the mass media such as advertising, advertorials and beauty advice impose nearly impossible standards of beauty on women, thereby convincing them that they are valued only for their appearance. The materiality of the female biological body has for the most part been excluded from representation in art and society. My art is aimed at finding alternative forms of female representation: therefore, forms that will re-present the material female body as a voluminous body and not only two-dimensional surface, as propagated by the mass media. My art thus addresses representations of women that stress women’s corporeality as perfected surface and commodity.”