Shelley van der Merwe was sexually abused by her parents as a child. Now she uses art to deal with the trauma, writes Kathryn Smith Practising artists have certain ideas about the creative process and the potential it offers to work through ideas and experiences. Mostly personal, these experiences are filtered through a process of intense self-criticism and aesthetic work to produce “art”. For an art writer, the success of this process remains a litmus test to accessing the work of other artists. The next step is to decide whether it’s “good art”. I hate that part. But on rare occasions, for whatever reasons, that question simply doesn’t figure. Sexuality, Hopelessness and Strength by Shelley van der Merwe, featured in Johannesburg on the ground-breaking Urban Futures exhibition programme, Bones and Bytes: Healing and Revealing, was such an occasion. While the sensational shows (in both senses of the word) amply filled the “revealing” half of the exhibition’s subtitle, “healing” was given an empathetic reading in the art therapy and child abuse areas of the exhibition complex, facilitated by art therapist Hayley Berman. Van der Merwe’s work, the artistic production of a survivor of incest and post- traumatic stress, immediately struck a chord as the most “real” thing on an exhibition in ages. Van der Merwe is currently in art therapy, and while the work wasn’t clearly Art-with-a-capital-A, it looked too critically considered to be therapy exercises.
As fine art goes, the work is technically very raw, combining paintings in bold, muddy colours and mixed media, sculptural objects and explanatory texts, part confessional, part conversational. As with any transgressive act, the attraction/repulsion dynamic was compelling in that someone was willing to share these experiences publicly. An introductory text read: “Most of the works in this exhibition were created over the past 15 months; all of them have to do with living with post-traumatic stress (PTS), resulting from a childhood of sexual abuse lasting over a decade, perpetrated by both of my parents. Prior to art therapy, I had been in ‘mainstream’ psychotherapy for about eight years. At one stage I had also been an art major at university. I started painting again on my own once I started dealing with the sexual abuse issues of my childhood in 1990.” Born in Sacramento, California, in 1966 she is one of several children born to a Methodist minister father and socially active Quaker mother. She met her South African husband Hugo van der Merwe at a United Nations summer school for Quaker youth in 1987. She came to work at the Quaker Peace Centre in Cape Town in 1988 and they later married and moved back to Washington DC where he completed a PhD, effectively avoiding conscription. Van der Merwe holds a master’s degree in sociology. She does not comply with the standard image of fellow incest survivors who often suffer drug addiction, alcoholism and abusive relationships. “It’s about issues of stability. In relationships prior to my marriage, I fit the standard pattern in the sense of abusive relationships,” she says. “But Hugo’s been incredibly supportive both in terms of my process and when I wanted to get back into painting. “I once asked him had he known what he was getting himself into, would he have agreed, and he was like ‘well, it’s been pretty hectic and pretty exhausting’ – trying to be all diplomatic.” She laughs. She is astonishingly pragmatic and frank about her experiences. A sculptural piece titled Meet My Parents features two open- work bricks, one covered in Quaker texts and the other in torn pages from the New Testament, representing her mother and father respectively. A speech bubble is attached to each, quoting her mother at a family dinner saying: “If a woman is being raped and can’t do anything about it, she may as well lie back and enjoy it.” Her father, when confronted by Van der Merwe’s sister with her memories: “I’ve thought about it a lot, really searched my memory, but can’t remember anything about what you’ve described. But you know, in some cultures it is perfectly normal for fathers to have sex with their children.” Van der Merwe’s own process has been made all the more frustrating by the constant denial and games of social truth and lies played by her middle class, respected family and her extended family. It’s the conflation of the private and public that makes the realm of art therapy and the exhibition of work produced in the art therapy space so compelling. It’s also the space where Van der Merwe has found a voice. “What is art therapy?” is a question few art therapists answer with ease. Art therapy is all about process. The end product is of secondary importance. It’s about providing someone with a “holding space” – a safe space in which they can explore personal issues without feeling compromised, judged or criticised, but all the while offering a means of communication other than verbal.
Anyone familiar with the workings of the art world would be hard-pressed to find common ground between art and art therapy. Art is all about criticism, judgement, evaluation and product. And while the “products” of art therapy are seldom shown, artists depend on their survival by exhibiting. So can you make art in art therapy? Van der Merwe’s work is unique in the way she conflates the fine art and art therapy processes, believing that art-making can begin in therapy but has to reach completion “at home”. Only one piece on the show, I Had a Gun, was produced completely in the therapy space. A body tracing of herself has been “painted” with what once was a clay gun that she had moulded. “That was the one I felt most ambivalent about showing, because to me, it’s very much more about a process than making something. It went through a lot more stages than the others. And I’m still not sure about the symbolism of making the clay gun into paint – the obvious interpretations of what that could mean don’t work for me at all.” Suddenly she asks: “Do you think you have to be self-destructive to make good art?” Contemporary art depends on the accommodation of challenging behaviour and image-making for its survival, a perception that Van der Merwe is convinced will, in the eyes of her family, “just be more of a reason to say I’m crazy – that’s the standard response from my mother”. Her stints at art school in California and Johannesburg and her own obsession with perfection prevented her “play” instinct from emerging. So why suddenly start painting again? “When one of my sisters came to me and told me what she remembered and wanted to know if I remembered anything, I didn’t believe her at first. But when I started, just out of the blue, out of nowhere, remembering things – I don’t want to call them flashbacks – but I was lying down to take a nap and suddenly I started seeing the living room of the house I grew up in and all the details of where the rip on the couch was, and where the table was nicked.I was about four years old in this particular memory. And when I saw what was going on … “When you grow up in that kind of family, there are a lot of things that are wrong with it, but you get away from it and have to start interacting, so there are a lot of reasons why things have never really felt that peaceful. A therapist asked me ‘when have you felt most at peace?’ and I said, ‘When I paint.'” Van der Merwe was introduced to art therapy by a midwife after her previous therapist emigrated to Australia. “It took a while for me to even touch anything in Hayley’s space because I felt it was just going to be another form of getting judged. That was my experience of art until that point, particularly if we were going to start talking about the family issues. To try to mix anything creative with talking about my family just doesn’t work. “I wouldn’t know how to explain the difference between conventional therapy and what we do there, but it certainly works for me. There are therapists in this country who are way more competent in dealing with rape and incest and post-traumatic stress issues than in the States, in my experience. Once it started – breaking down the dams – it kind of unlocked things for me to set up a space of my own at home. “I toyed with the idea of doing a fine arts degree, but I think I want to leave this area of my life as something that I can do to feel more connected and to feel more safe.”
In “coming out” with the exhibition (her phrasing), Van der Merwe wanted to demystify the child abuse experience, or at least get people to acknowledge what goes on behind closed doors. Her consternation and anger is understandable when she confronted a curtain installed in the doorway to her exhibition space and a sign was placed at the entrance stating that some of the material may be upsetting to sensitive viewers and children. She ripped down the curtain, “so that it doesn’t read like a peep show – what you don’t want to happen is for the issue of incest to be hidden behind yet another layer, yet another veil”. And as for the children’s warning – her work was being shown alongside similar work made by children.
Work produced in therapy is very rarely shown publicly, but when therapist Berman offered Van der Merwe the opportunity, she leapt at it – with fleeting moments of ambivalence: “It was amazing that it happened when it did. I’m not sure what I would have done otherwise. One reason I may have had to show this work is that it’s some kind of transition between finally saying I have spent so many years dealing with this stuff, and have found a medium to make the transition, and I think maybe now I can move on.”
Catharsis, however latent, is really the only possible “product” common to art and art therapy. Van der Merwe has an interesting take on it: “There were feelings of being enabled to express things/images that people don’t want to see, but it was a slow process rather than a ‘Big Bang of realisation’.
“Also, I have frustratingly accepted that what I may have thought was cathartic is actually just learning to express myself honestly, and that I need to keep doing this for the rest of my life. I think that’s a big part of why I wanted to participate in the exhibition – I needed to get things out in the open.”
Van der Merwe has been confronting her parents with these issues for about 10 years, trying in vain to get them to pay for therapy when she didn’t have health insurance. But any involvement on their part, in the legalistic society of the United States, would be akin to admitting some kind of guilt, which has still not been acknowledged. Neither has prosecution been pursued.
“The laws are different in each state according to the statute of limitations, but it’s really hard. I had gone as far as to contact the head of the child pornography unit at the police department in Sacramento but it’s such a hard thing to trace. You can’t go to the public library and check out magazines and films and say ‘oh look, there I am!'” Her self-effacing manner is quite unnerving, but her work aggressively seeks to claim ownership of herself. A Moment of Contentedness is a body-cast in plaster bandage strips donated by Smith & Nephew in Pinetown, Durban. Her pose is relaxed and introspective, a change in tone from some of the other pieces she’s made. It sat facing It’s Mine I and II, Van der Merwe’s body prints on canvas. The Johannesburg exhibition has closed but Van der Merwe has a second opportunity to exhibit, this time on the current Unisa exhibition, Forces of Trauma and Powers of Healing, which owes much to the work of Bones and Bytes. It presents a remarkably diverse range of work, much of which is drawn from the impressive Unisa collections, giving material form to the personal and collective experiences that individual, spiritual or political trauma has evoked, and the potential that artistic production has for catharsis. Meet My Parents and A Moment of Contentedness are both on view. And a quiet walk around should make it clear that no matter how personal the experience, art is not only a polyglot, but a powerful redemptive ally. Whether good or bad, it may not have the power to change the world (least of all in a country where culture is more or less shelved as a frivolous accessory), but it certainly has the ability, in whatever form, to become a much- needed communication, and thus empowering, device.
Forces of Trauma and Powers of Healing is on view at the Unisa Gallery in Pretoria until October 31