Art

07.07.2010 / Unity in fragmentation in Janet Botes’ mixed media artworks

“We are shaped by our experiences, the people around us and the things we decide to make our own. I believe deeply in the human spirit as being nurturing, creative, loving, free, peaceful and compassionate. With a love for art, the environment, people and new experiences I enjoy getting involved in different projects and I work in a wide variety of disciplines and media. I am also deeply interested in philosophical and critical thoughts about our interaction with the environment, society, ourselves and religion, which offers my creative work a range of different subjects or sources for reference and inspiration.”

JANET BOTES was born and grew up in Vanderbijlpark, a riverside town to the South of Johannesburg. After studying Graphic Design at the Vaal University of Technology and attaining a B Tech qualification (cum laude), Janet worked and lived in Johannesburg, and then Pretoria, before settling in Cape Town. Janet has always loved drawing and finds personal peace and freedom in the creation process, especially when experimenting and combining different mediums. The images she creates aims to give life to emotion, internal struggles, or ideas.

As kids, Janet’s parents often took her and her sister camping throughout our beautiful country - including coastal towns, waterfalls in Mpumalanga, the Drakensberg, the West Coast, Eastern Cape, and annual visits to the family farm in Upington in the Northern Cape. This spurred a deep love and affinity for nature and animals which inspires and guides a lot of her creative work. Other influences, interests and inspiration include people, other artists, magazines, film, performance art, spirituality, and culture. This results in a varied set of influences on Janet’s art and creative work – which ranges widely between digital illustration, mixed media painting, drawing, assemblage, sculpture and installation.

Her work seems fairly fragmented due to the diversity of materials and amount of experimentation, but on closer inspection a repetition of subject matter and overall production methods create a unity. The subject matter usually revolves around the natural environments that we find ourselves in and our reaction or interaction with these environments; while production methods are usually mixed media, digital and photographic prints, experimental assemblage pieces, or largely drawing-based compositions of landscapes and animals.

Janet Botes is an artist, writer and arts facilitator.