Cover Reveal -The Creative Arts: On Practice, Making & Meaning

Dryad Press is delighted to reveal the cover for our new book, forthcoming in May 2024, The Creative Arts: On Practice, Making & Meaning. This innovative and exciting book features a collection of fifteen essays on the transformative nature of creative arts across a broad spectrum of creative fields including poetry, prose, science fiction, dance, music, podcasting and others. Look out for essays by your favourite South African writers, academics and poets including, Vonani Bila, Phillippa Yaa de Villiers, vangile gantsho, Ashraf Jamal, Liesl Jobson, Lliane Loots, Wamuwi Mbao, Kobus Moolman, Stephanus Muller, Sally Ann Murray, Masande Ntshange, Uhuru Phalafala, Annel Pieterse, Meg Vandermerwe and Simon van Schalkwyk. With a compelling foreword by renowned academic Gabeba Baderoon, these essays explore the challenges of producing creative work and offer critical insights that occur when imagination meets discipline.

The art that graces our cover is titled On Humankind i, by the talented Henrietta Scholtz.

Henrietta is a self-taught visual artist and curator, based at Bag Factory Artists’ Studios, Fordsburg, Johannesburg. She has an English Literature degree and an honours degree in Communications Management from VEGA. Henrietta has exhibited in group shows, including the Turbine Art Fair, the National Arts Festival, Sasol New Signatures, Thami Mnyele Fine Art Awards and The Centre for the Less Good Idea’s Long Minute. Since 2021, she has been the assistant curator of the SABC Art Collection. On Humankind, the cover art, is a two-part meditation on what it means to be a ‘self’ within a body created by those who have come before. It is an archaeology of the self (both created and creative) within the time-travel of meditation and thought, influenced by the Cradle of Humankind. In Henrietta’s words:

“We are process as we live and breathe everyday within our bodies, communities and geographies. We are renewing and regenerating and decaying. From flesh to bone to dust, we continue the creative process of the physical, historical, geographical, ancestral and temporal.”