About

I was born and raised in Namibia, where sun is plentiful and diversity an inspiring yet challenging condition of experience! Boredom is never an option 🙂

My current projects involve exploring expressive therapies, giving intuitive painting classes and workshops, and completing an honours degree in Psychology.

I work primarily in oil paints, from a source of personal experiences and contexts. My  artworks are typically marked by a tension between figuration and abstraction. The use of texture, layering, and intentional obliteration characterise a spontaneous and intuitive approach.

I am currently employing mixed media to explore themes connected to the manifestation of trauma, by examining narratives of individual and collective memory and myth.

“Painting is for me a kind of alchemy: The expressive process in itself already achieves a transfiguration which may encompass both creator and spectator. In this sense, to create signifies a non-finite and organic process of mutual resonances and exchanges. On this journey I narrate wounds, address absences, and imagine dreams.”

 

“Diaz Point” Oil on Canvas 1998

Artist: Silke Berens

Diaz Point is at the coast of perhaps the most desolate town in the whole universe: Lüderitz was built on the discovery of diamonds in the desert at the end of the 19th century; today it has a small fishing industry and some offshore diamond mining vessels keeping it alive. I spent a few years living there, entranced by the feeling of complete exposure to the extreme elements existing between desert and ocean. That’s me on the rickety old bridge fighting the constant, merciless wind…

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