Spectre I

Ilené Bothma’s oil paintings are meditations on grief, loss, change that is felt in the interiority of a family constellation. Her large paintings consider the threads and woven relationships between mother and child, between partners raising children, and what happens if divorce or separation shifts and changes the dynamics of a family. 

Along with this Ilené considers tenderly and with such fine attentiveness, reminicent of the great romantic painters, a longing - a yearning and rich, carefully tended nostalgia. Her works all include fabric draped to swaddle and care and warm her children, but are also reminiscent of shrouds and cerements that cover bodies, to mourn losses in memorial, her brush offers condolences to her own feelings and to finding ways to live with change. In divorce and even in the pain of watching children grow up, she tends to and drapes memories in shrouds, and holds wit(h)ness and vigil to the losses inherent in growing up.