Katja Abbott

After studying graphic design and working as a freelance graphic designer, illustrator and editor for many years, in 2022 Katja completed a Visual Arts degree (hons) through UNISA with distinction. Using a variety of mediums including clay, textiles and mixed media, she explores animal forms that emerge through dreams and imaginary realms. The creatures serve as gateways to the instinctual phenomenal world, silent familiars or emissaries bridging the conscious and unconscious worlds.

Artist’s Statement

Marc Chagall’s colourful, dream-like paintings abound with chickens, goats, horses, donkeys, dogs and cats who appear to float and drift through the compositions often in hybrid form.

Taking on iconographic symbolism based on Chagall’s rural childhood in a Hassidic community in Russia, the animals gaze at the viewer with aware and knowing eyes. For Chagall the animal represents the qualities of harmony and contentment with the cycles of nature, cycles which humankind in its restlessness and greed, has abandoned.

It is these animals of Chagall’s, liberated from the laws of gravity, giving visual expression to the traces of dreams, that have provided the inspiration for the sculptures I have made for Dialogues.