Natasha Thom

The presenter of the works and the comments which were written about Natasha in this book is Irmgard Else Thom (Imme), Natasha’s mother. She studied psychology, law, art, and theology, as well as art and sandplay therapy. She is a practicing art and sandplay therapist, teaching member of the ISST (International Society of Sandplay Therapy). Her real qualification is 45 years of therapy and teaching in South Africa, Central Africa, China, Germany, and the US. She focusses on marginal communities, has been focusing on townships in South Africa, in youth prisons and with addicts. Her passion is to help addicts by spreading Natasha’s message.

The author and artist represented is Natasha Naida Thom. To her art was life. In her own words: “As I see it, my search over the years and my travels of which my art is a kind of diary… but more a real, (almost a living) part of me… has centred on an exploration of universal truths.

Ever since I was a child I was somehow set on this quest: To discover the truth. I have captured my reflections whilst exploring the world, through the use of art. I feel that art is a means through which mankind can illustrate the few small truths that he does perceive, and so build on them. If change is the flow of life, then art is the picture that represents the way life’s river flows. To me it is a representation made up of parts and particles of the real object or event, which may be put together by the artist. In traveling and at home I find drawing and writing an immediate form of self-expression, and they are also a method to concentrate and reflect upon your surroundings, and the people within them. Art is an expression and representation, which to me, is a moment captured to be held away from the vicious jaws of time (that so relentlessly and eternally gnaw away at all living things) for just a little longer than the event itself, thus giving us some borrowed time to contemplate the way life unfolds for just a little longer than life would grant man without the use of art. We could say that it is the nature of art to hold itself a little aloof from time. Due to this aspect of art’s nature, art gives man the ability to look at him/herself and the world from a more objective, contemplative perspective. Through art man may momentarily lift himself out of the rut in which he blindly works himself to a secure death and look at life from a bird’s eye view.”