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BIO

Klaré van Heerden (b. 1999) is a South African artist and academic whose practice unfolds along two parallel paths: KMVH and Klaré van Heerden. Together, they form a single body of work grounded in emotion, nature, and the complexity of the human psyche.

Under Klaré van Heerden, she works as a transdisciplinary artist who explores trauma, survival, and the human condition through sculptural paintings and material experimentation. These works are shaped by personal history and by ongoing research in the transcendental, philosophy, and healing.

Under KMVH, van Heerden turns to landscape as a mirror for the inner world. Working with charcoal and acrylic on canvas and wood, the Charcoal Series translates stillness, grief, and transformation into the visual rhythms of the ocean and the mountains. These works are rooted in direct, emotionally loaded encounters with the natural world and shaped by research in philosophy, psychoanalysis, and mystical thought. Central to this practice is the oceanic feeling: a psychological and spiritual sense of dissolving into something vast and unbounded, and the question of whether, within that dissolution, the self can find not resolution but recognition.

Van Heerden holds a Fine Art degree from Michaelis School of Fine Art and is completing a Master’s in Philosophy and the Study of Religions at the University of Cape Town. Her work creates a beautiful melody of grief, pain, recognition, and an enduring, terrifying tenderness.

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The Ocean Series forms the foundation of KMVH’s practice. Each work begins with a direct encounter with the sea: not as observation but as immersion in something that cannot be controlled or fully understood. Working with charcoal and acrylic on canvas and wood, van Heerden traces the movement between stillness and turbulence, between grief and transformation. The process is physical and meditative; charcoal resists, accumulates, and erases, enacting on the surface what the ocean enacts on the self.

At the heart of these works is the oceanic feeling, Freud’s term for a sensation of boundlessness: of being one with the external world as a whole. Where Freud read this as regression, these works propose the opposite. The dissolution of self-boundaries before the ocean is not a loss but a threshold; a place where the self, stripped of its defences, can be recognised rather than resolved. The sea does not offer healing. It offers something more difficult and more honest: the reflection of what is already there.

Each drawing is an act of mourning and of return. The same sea reappears across the series, yet never the same; each work is a moment of suspension between what has been destroyed and what might, within that destruction, still belong.

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Artist Statement

KMVH’s practice began after a series of traumas in which language fractured and the 'old self' was stripped away. The first space that made it possible to breathe again was the ocean, not because it offered healing, but because it offered recognition. In the presence of the ocean, the feelings of loss, emptiness, and dissolution were not resolved but reflected. That reflection and recognition was the beginning of what this practice investigates.

Central to this investigation is Sigmund Freud's concept of the Oceanic Feeling: a sensation of eternity, and of being one with the external world as a whole. The Oceanic Feeling is encountered not as an escape but as a form of recognition and return to the pre-language self, and functions as a liminal space: a threshold between destruction and belonging, between violence and return. Freud dismissed this experience as a regressive illusion and the residue of an infantile form of consciousness. KMVH’s practice proposes a counter-reading/experience to Freud’s self-referential clinical framework. For KMVH, the dissolution of self-boundaries before the ocean does not signify regression; rather, it becomes a philosophical mode of undoing, a necessary annihilation of the fabricated self, built as a defence after trauma has fractured the self's core. The Oceanic Feeling was not regressing - it was a return to the pre-constructed self.

The works engage critically with the tradition of the sublime and diverge from Kant's formulation, which demands that the subject abandon sensibility in favour of transcendent reason. Following Friedrich Schiller's opposing understanding, the sublime is not a division of faculties but a product of their intensification: what Schiller called 'energetic beauty', in which the soul is disturbed and thereby occasioned to produce harmony. Dissolution and belonging coexist within what Schiller called the 'aesthetic condition', not against it. The ocean does not ask the self to transcend the body. It creates a space in which sensuous and rational powers operate without constraint.

Working with charcoal and acrylic on canvas and wood, the process is both meditative and intensely physical. Charcoal resists obedience; it stains the hand and erases the carefully calculated plan. Each work begins with structure and ends in absolute dissolution, enacting what Walter Benjamin might describe as a rupture in the cycle of mythic justification: a threshold between control and surrender. Drawing on Derrida's concept of différance, each work operates through repetition and deferral; the same sea reappears, yet never the same as before. The ocean evokes an Oceanic Feeling that the ‘self’ experiences, which cannot be possessed, only approached. Meaning becomes visible through what cannot be fixed.

These works do not seek to resolve the tension between selfhood and dissolution. They ask what remains when the self is stripped of its ‘rational’ order and reflected in the turbulent movement of water. They ask whether the loss of self-boundary constitutes a crisis or a threshold, and whether, within that fragility, the possibility of recognition can emerge. It is not peace that the ocean offers. It is the recognition that, in this violent world, the self can dissolve and still exist.

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