Cassie Snelgar’s champion for The Wick is Richard Chang. Chang says “my mentorship of Cassie evolved quite organically; first from sharing my experiences as a collector and patron of the arts and later to providing more direct feedback as her practice evolved over the years. Cassie draws from a wide range of influences and synthesises these into a rich distinctive language that is uniquely her own. Spanning from abstraction to figuration, I find her work to be familiar yet refreshingly new.”

Those influences include the theories of Jung and Freud (she studied architecture and psychology prior to art) the writing of Virginia Woolf, and “the potential of quantum physics”, all of which allow her to access a “somatic practice of painting that reveals the mystical hidden realm of the unconscious world.”

Snelgar describes her latest body of work as constituting a “real breakthrough”. Following a traumatic experience the artist went through three years ago, Snelgar had been struggling to make work – “it literally blocked my ability to access my creative and conceptual expression. Being able to get back into flow and create works that integrate my whole being again is something I never thought I would recover. It forced me to approach my subject matter with a completely new perspective and go deeper than I ever imagined I could.”

These new paintings see her steer more towards figuration, something she has also experimented with in the past. Nude women’s bodies are entangled with men, rendered in a flat and minimal style, with thick, expressionistic accents of oil paint. In these new paintings, realities converge and collapse, splintered glimpses into a buried realm. Snelgar doesn’t see these paintings as individual, or closed off, but a generative and interconnected dive into her unconscious states of being, guided by paint.

The paintings will come together in a solo exhibition titled Memoir Club at Everard Read Gallery, South Africa, later this year. “This body of work feels like the first time I’ve succeeded in accessing a level of flow where I can begin to merge the material world with the unconscious in a kaleidoscopic manner, echoing the fractured and layered nature of memory, with perceived ‘reality’.”