Neil Badenhorst

Neil Badenhorst (b. 1995) is an artist and illustrator based in Pretoria. He completed his Undergraduate and Honours degrees in Visual Communication with a major in Illustration at the Open Window, graduating in 2017 and 2018 respectively. Badenhorst began his Masters in Illustration in 2019, exploring ritual spaces and crisis heterotopias in illustrated fantasy books. Badenhorst has been pursuing a career as an independent artist since his early days at University and has also worked as a freelance illustrator and designer, as well as a lecturer, since then.

Badenhorst’s ultimate goal as a creative is to be a ‘jack of all trades, master of none’. Through formally taught in digital design and illustration, Badenhorst’s artistic practice extends into painting, collage, and more recently digital and traditional installation art. His practice is largely concerned with themes such as liminality, multi-layered space and experience, queer themes, ritual process and imaginary worlds. Badenhorst’s creative process relies heavily on intuition, and his dreamscapes are a desperate attempt to map out the eternally expanding internal landscape, and recollection of memories from other worlds and universes.

Badenhorst's master's exhibition, between worlds, explores these themes in practice. The exhibition centers around fragments of a narrative I have been piecing together for most of my life, from recorded dreams and daydreams. The exhibition consists of illustrated pieces that tell stories about things I ‘remember’ in the otherworld. The gallery space ultimately becomes both a ritual space (a liminal space between this world and our own), but also becomes the book of sorts; as one must move through the space to follow and piece together the narrative. The narrative, and world, the pieces centre around were never exactly an intentional creation on my part. It developed naturally from dreams and my imagination, piecing itself together. Thus artmaking, here, became a deeply personal ritual process where I am almost desperately clinging to the memories of my life in the otherworld I encounter when asleep or daydreaming; and it is these stories and spaces that allow me to reflect and make better sense of my experiences within the ‘real’ world.