Creation is a presence that moves just beyond the reach of our understanding like a shadow on the edge of thought that seems to retreat the closer we approach it. The act of creation is not merely the process of assembling materials into form but more a mysterious convergence of Earth and element and inspiration and intention and chance and what might be called divine intervention giving birth to something wholly new, something the world has never before known, something with its own unique molecular structure, its own pattern stamped into the fabric of existence.

The painter gazes into the emptiness of a canvas and perceives visions invisible to all but themselves and the musician hears symphonies in the wind and crashing waves that passes through another’s ears mistaken for silence. The architect reads cathedrals in the slight geometry of stone when the stonemason sees a pile of rocks but the same stonemason sees a thousand subtle textures and colours in the same stone that the same architect does not see.

We each imagine beauty in a personal language that only we speak but one that all can hear and understand. When we stop to consider it, the act of creation is not separate from us but perhaps the very essence of who we are, though it is vast and infinite in its implications. Every thought, every gesture, every choice is a small act of world-making.

We can trace these thoughts of creation back to the very dawn of humanity. If Eve was supposedly shaped from the rib of Adam and Adam born from a breath of dust, then who shaped the hand that shaped her and who drew the breath that bore him? If the Earth was formed from all matter, energy and time collapsing into a single point before unfurling into the vastness of space, from where did that first conception of matter, energy and time arise? And even if we could name the maker of these things, what answer could we give to the question of who made the maker?

Such questions have no end. They are quiet mysteries that have likely haunted humankind since we first woke to an awareness of our surroundings and they will follow us still for as long as our feet are pressing into the ground.

The persistence of these questions can be seen as a sign of vitality as the search for answers to life’s most profound mysteries is a worthy pursuit that demands great courage, yet if we are ourselves the very essence of creation then surrendering to what is and accepting that not all things are meant to be understood may be what allows the true magic and mystery of life to awaken. Giving in to the ecstasy of the present moment is what the spirit of creation requires for one to truly and fully connect with her.

But if these questions of origin and purpose continue to lead us down an endless spiral into the unknown, perhaps it is in the artist, a living testament to creation made flesh, that we find their most tangible answer. The work of the artist shows us the magnificence of creation in its rarest and most human form, a display of the extraordinary, a showing of darkness and beauty and pain.

It’s almost like the artist willingly connects with the spirit of creation instead of letting creation unfold before them and the process of connecting with this spirit takes them into a world where the reality that is known in the waking state doesn’t exist and where the echoes of personal and ancient memory rise to meet them from some far unknown place demanding to be shaped into form.

With courage the artist emerges not untouched but transformed, healed, full of strength, tired but not broken, and the product of this sacred dance is something so magnificent that anyone who ever found themselves a witness would feel a feeling so deep within their breast, a feeling so profound and wonderful that their thoughts from then on would only ever be focused on the idea of creation itself. They ask themselves the same questions that have haunted humankind since the beginning.

I suppose the artist can be viewed as a sort of bridge between reality and something much bigger and the sole purpose of the artist’s product is to inspire the witness to connect with the spirit of creation in their own personal manner.

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Two works from the Weight of Expectation series holding space against a deep maroon backdrop, photographed by Dan Carter

Karlien and I cross paths and immediately fall into a trance of conversation, the kind of conversation where your entire world shrinks into the space between yourself and who you’re conversing with and where everything outside of the space between is somewhat blurred and irrelevant, the sounds other than your two voices becoming a hushed and muffled hum and your egos are stripped away and there’s no substance-less exchanging of pleasantries, only two beings curiously and gently exploring the human consciousness and escaping reality for a few hours while simultaneously pondering what exactly reality is.

I learn of her experience as a sculptress and almost instantly recognise that she is no stranger to the spirit of creation. The relationship she has with this sacred entity is truly special and significant and I think to myself how it must be explored further.

We both remark on the rarity of these kinds of interactions and how painfully wonderful they are. The place I enter during such conversations is not far from a dream realm akin to the deep current one feels when surrendering to the very creative process that Karlien and I find ourselves speaking of, and I ask her what she sees in the inner landscapes that live within her, the places she visits when she closes her eyes at night.

She speaks of a wilderness woven into her very fibres where the air is as sharp as glass and alive with the slow intelligence of unseen creatures moving through iron-rich stone and salt bush. It feels at once like a memory to her, like an echo of places traversed in her childhood, a presence that breathes with her being.

I think we all have these landscapes that live within us. I think they’ve always been within us and always will be. Perhaps they’re places we’ve come from in a previous life or places we’re trying to return to and the people we share such divine connections with in this life come from the same place and we’re made of the same things and we’re all just walking each other home. The place I envision Karlien coming from is not far from the one she described.

I see her spirit emerging from a land where the sun spills molten gold over ancient mountains that crown the horizon watching over hard, arid plains scattered with shifting dunes and wild sage and gnarled num-num trees and rocks so intricate in their textures that the closer you look the further you seem to travel into them, like when the final light of day pours over the mountain and every ridge and weatherworn fold and vein of stone in its body becomes visible, so visible and clear that it’s like the air has been polished by a magnificent summer rainstorm.

The difference between life and death is so minute in this place that the two are known as the same thing by its inhabitants. There is no language to divide them. Life and death are celebrated and experienced equally and simultaneously. Life is fought for and death is earned. Her spirit comes from a place where very few people come from and where few people ever will go.

She runs like a wild mare across velds swept bare by centuries of wind where the breath of the dunes shift in restless patterns and she meets a deep, glacial blue expanse of ocean when she glides over the horizon where waves rise fierce and fall heavy with kelp streaming like the hair of sea goddesses and reefs erupting from the seabed in bursts of bright colour. At night she lays beneath a crescent moon pinned to a deep purple sky and sinks her hands into the fine orange sand until she feels the Earth’s quiet pulse, hears her cries, hears her laughter, sees her yesterdays, sees her tomorrows, and then her hands begin to move, pressing and shaping.

It’s from these places that we take our inspiration. We turn our energy inwards to see what it is truly that our souls desire to create. From this inner world meaning arrives through sensation and so our sensory perception of reality becomes the physical element of inspiration that helps give form to what the soul longs to express in whatever medium calls to us most strongly.

It seems only right that Karlien expresses herself through clay sculpting. She describes to me how clay begins as rock and gets broken down over hundreds of years until only the finest mineral plates remain before they settle into deposits, into minerals so fine they can be carried by wind and rain, and it’s this slow process that gives clay its rare, workable nature. It’s the same quality that once allowed humans to form the first objects of utility and art.

Karlien has an untamed wildness about her and a completely natural connection to the elements that I sense assists her control the power of the age-old Earth as she holds it between her fingers, and at the same time her gentle elegance and grace guides her every move, her every subtle press.

Her vases are crowned with branching filaments, fungal lace and coral-like ridges that recall mineral-encrusted stone and networked mycelium and one senses in their forms echoes of termite mounds, volcanic textures and the ochre-drenched coastal scrublands of the west coast of South Africa. Her work glows with the tension between delicate fragility and raw, earthy resilience and it’s almost like she makes offerings to Mother Nature herself, whispering gratitude for the abundance and beauty she continues to share. Each piece is a small act of thanksgiving and kinship.

image host Held close like a vessel of memory, a piece from the Weight of Expectation series, photographed by Dan Carter

We speak of love and loss and the depths of pain that the human experience can cause one to feel. I always find that there is an enveloping warmth apparent in someone who is aware of the pain that dwells within them and who chooses to acknowledge it instead of hiding from it, allowing it to shape them into something stronger and more compassionate instead of letting it harden their heart and cloud the way they view the world.

We tell each other stories of our youth and how the innocence of the child gets shed once the awareness of ourselves is discovered and how the world we know today can pull us away from the magic and mystery of life that we so naturally embraced when we were young. The child’s unfiltered wonder at each fresh experience, moment by moment, may be the truest state of being we can know, and the more Karlien and I speak of this the more I see how the child within her is very much nurtured and deeply loved.

I ask her why she thinks clay sculpting became her medium of expression and she mentions that the act of holding and pressing the soft pieces of Earth for the first time was so similar to the play of the child that her brain could not contain its excitement and joy. Her work is rooted in play, her entire dance with the spirit of creation comes from the most tender and delicate parts of her being yet the product of this dance manages to tell the stories of some of the harshest and toughest aspects of the human condition.

Her work carries a rugged, weathered exterior yet holds a supple, yielding core. It’s much like the process of sculpting itself in which pliable clay is shaped before enduring the fire that gives it strength. Her sculptures are a pure representation of herself. They’re so elegant and feminine, so wild and untamed, so free.

The pain from the past leads some to cultivate love from within instead of searching for it externally which allows them to increase their capacity for love of all things, allowing all parts of themselves to safely come to the surface and to simply be and to exist. The love that Karlien cultivates overflows and it pours into the cups of all of those around her and it shines golden from her amber-shaded eyes, amber like honey in the sun. They glisten and lighten when she speaks of her beloved late father.

She shares how she and him both felt more at home in the wild than among people, being stripped bare by the elements and belonging to the stones, the wind, the patterned hides of Nguni cattle. She still carries the rusted patina of his presence like a weathered cape, a salt-of-the-earth magnitude that has become part of her own essence.

Oh, how the heart aches when we think about those we have lost. When the divine, larger-than-life beings that roam among us take leave of this Earth, the beings so extraordinary and wonderful and otherworldly, it’s nice to think that it’s not as sad as we make it out to be because they were never really from here to begin with. They were from a place far beyond the reality we know and they take leave once they have shared their light and they return to the landscapes they see when they close their eyes. We will cross paths with them again whenever it is that we’re destined to. Karlien carries the spirit of her father within her and the light that shines from her is his light.

We speak of the times we had met the divine through our connections with other people. Those connections where you can communicate with someone without speaking and it’s like you know all of their thoughts and they know yours and where you unconsciously find yourself mimicking their movements and saying the things that they say, where their eyes are mirrors reflecting all of the parts of your being back at you and where you exist with them as one in a connection so powerful that life becomes so full and death feels so far away.

I ask her what beauty means to her and she speaks of a beauty in nature and in people that is earned, like how the fynbos aloe grows fierce spines and thorns in defence and they’re not flaws but emblems of survival. They’re a testament to its endurance and adaptation. The imperfections, fractures, and crookedness of existence are often what we cherish most for they remind us of the impermanence of all things. They remind us that untested beauty can fade and that death can strip away shallow associations of what beauty is at any given point.

The beauty that is earned by those that are strong and courageous is a beauty that is deep and true and it runs far beyond the skin. Karlien’s work embodies this hidden beauty. It’s drawn from the strata beneath the Earth’s own surface, far removed from the glitter and gloss of the hollow spectacle that pervades modern culture. It’s a beauty intense and so singular that the uninitiated viewer standing before it for the first time might realise with a start that they didn’t know such beauty existed, waiting, unrecognised, just beyond the edges of their knowing.

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Hands and clay meet, a piece from the Weight of Expectation series, photographed by Dan Carter

We speak of trauma and healing and what it means to feel safe and at home. I tell her of the places I’ve been to where my soul felt at ease and where the people who surrounded me made me feel like death didn’t exist and life would continue on forever.

She tells me of her years in remote Australia living alongside Indigenous communities and working as a full-time activist against mining companies trying to exploit land and how much those years shaped her worldview, seeing firsthand the injustice that’s born when greed and power consume the human mind and ego and how the harm inflicted by such greed wounds communities and gets passed down like an unwanted inheritance, carried in memory and in bloodline in an endless and helpless cycle.

I suppose the one who has been to hell and managed to find some kind of way back is never quite the same afterwards and something in them becomes attuned to the suffering of others. They become compelled to do everything in their power to stand between humanity and the dark abyss they know the mind can descend into. An abyss they themselves once traversed. Like the artist who meets the most shadowed parts of themselves in their dance with creation and decides to transmute what they’ve seen into something the world might find beautiful.

These kinds of beings, the empaths, the healers, the artists, are able to themselves heal from this process, breaking free from painful memories associated with people, places and things and creating the platform for new memories and experiences to be made. What a tragedy life would be if these kinds of people were not among us. There is perhaps no greater honour than to rise from our own depths and to offer what we have learnt in service to another.

The blur of the space surrounding myself and her slowly fades away and the muffled sounds grow louder and clearer as reality returns to normal and the trance of conversation concludes and us two conversers part ways. We all long to surround ourselves with those who make us feel loved and who elevate our frequencies to high places where life is beauty full all the time and where we all create our own Heaven on Earth.

We will continue living and breathing and dancing with the spirit of creation, bringing to form whatever it is that we feel called to bring. Why do we create? Why do we search inwards and tear through the layers of pain and break down the walls that we’ve built within us to reveal the truth of our identities and souls? Perhaps these are questions similar to those that have haunted humankind since the beginning of time, questions that the answers need not be known.

One is loved because one is loved. There is no reason needed for loving. One creates because one creates. There is too no reason needed for creation. So we continue living, creating, dancing, dreaming, loving. We return to the inner landscapes when we close our eyes and slip into our evening slumber and we become the wild mare running across the arid plains, we become the valiant eagle soaring through the purple and orange sky, we become the loyal wolf wandering the depths of the misty forest.

And in the morning when we rise, we ask the Great Spirit for strength to face the needs of the new day and we smile and think to ourselves how this moment is just so lovely and we’ll never be here again.