Womanhood and nature collide in ‘Garden of Her Dreams’ show

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Everard Read’s Johannesburg gallery is playing host to  paintings and bronzes by artist Shany van den Berg. Garden of Her Dreams reflects notions of connecting womanhood with nature via the many emotions carried by a shared symbol — flowers.

At first glance, Van den Berg’s works appear simple and clean but the simplicity of flowers is the vehicle for the intense emotions seen through the floral arrangements and feminine figures. 

These ideas mirror a similar cycle of life, which is centred on nurturing and seasonal changes.

“A devotion to plant life passed from mother to daughter. These memories and knowledge are nurtured by the cycles of life mirrored in family lines and changing seasons,” says the gallery.

Works on the exhibition include Otherworldly , a surreal vision of untrammelled freedom expressed through the female form, which rests in nature as a muse that mystifies and acts as a source of inspiration for solace.

Van den Berg connects nature, womanhood and her place in the world, with an evidently deep inspiration taken from the natural world’s abundance, which for many — in addition to their own physical bodies — is a place of sanctuary. 

Flowers Arranged in my Dream exposes the role flowers play in Van den Berg’s daily life through a muted still life of blooms in a vase, while Flowers from Another Garden reveals the emotions evoked by the feminine presence in a world surrounded by flora.

For Van den Berg, the paintings’ feminine forms “are resting in the otherworldly garden of my dreams, encircled by luscious foliage and the fragrance of the moon flower”, drawing inspiration from moody master painters such as Eugene Delacroix and Diego Velazquez.

Goddesses of the Pink Moon is an enchanting depiction of a nocturnal conversation between feminine and floral figures, almost like a translation of the sacred conversations between nature and women who find safety in the physical and emotional softness of the floral kingdom. 

The petals act as vehicles for the weight of “love, passion, purity, innocence and death”, says Van den Berg.

The flowers in her paintings and bronzes act as allies and sympathetic beings in a caustic world where the real beasts are humans. 

The works feel like a form of catharsis which helps alleviate the noise of the everyday and replace it with gentle introspection and a newfound respect for flora. They are both serious and dreamy. 

The Garden of Her Dreams exhibition is an evolution of Van den Berg’s 2022 solo show Her Garden, which she put on in London. 

Her Garden was not only about an embodiment of a woman’s place in the world and her connection to nature, but Gaia too, a Greek goddess who is the personification of Earth.

What is clear is Van den Berg’s works are allegorical; everything the women in these otherworldly landscapes touch or see presents their own deeper and symbolic meaning. 

They are a vivid response to those who seek softness in a world dominated by hard truths. The feminine bodies in the works are unclothed, signalling there are few to no patriarchal restrictions on those who frolic in the sanctuary of the natural world.

Garden of Her Dreams by Shany van den Berg will be on at the Everard Read in Rosebank, Johannesburg until 22 July.