Klaré van Heerden

Klaré van Heerden (b. 1999) is a Cape Town-based artist and academic practicing under two parallel paths: KMVH and Klaré van Heerden. She holds a BAFA from Michaelis School of Fine Art, and is currently completing a Masters in Philosophy focusing on violence. Together these disciplines form the foundation for her work which deals with trauma and grief as intrinsic to our lives.​

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Under KMVH, she turns to the ocean, symbolic of the “Oceanic Feeling”, as a mirror for the turbulence and grief stored in our own psyches. Her work is rooted in emotionally-loaded encounters with nature, which she sees as a conduit for the “Sublime”, and is shaped by philosophy, psychoanalysis, and mystical thought. KMVH built this practice of drawing intensive, embodied, charcoal landscapes as a way to encounter her own grief in the visual rhythms of the “Oceanic Feeling”  which is a Freudian psychoanalytic concept central to this practice. The “Oceanic Feeling” reflects the liminal, boundless sense of being one with the universe. While Freud saw the pre-lingual self encountering the Oceanic Feeling as regression, Klaré sees it as a return to the self pre-ideology and instrumentalisation where your inner core can be recognised by something vast and unbounded. She says: “We live in a world where everyone has trauma and it needs to be recognised. I draw so that anyone who encounters my work might find a space of recognition for their own inner turbulence. The Oceanic Feeling does this for me.”

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Under Klaré van Heerden, she works as a transdisciplinary artist who explores trauma, survival, and the human condition through sculptural paintings and material experimentation. This strand of her practice foregrounds the transformative potential of creativity and the slow work of tending to emotional wounds.