Ilene Bothma
“Bothma handles her subject matter with boldness and the proficiency of a master.”
— Sandra Botnen, curator
“The repetitive nature of knitting, or the excruciatingly slow process of painting stiches and lace on canvass, mimics the labor involved in motherhood, the tedium of the everyday tasks involved in keeping tiny humans healthy and happy. It has become conceptually vital that there is an element of repetition and labor in my work.”
Day 10 brings us South African Artist Ilene Bothma. I learned about Bothma when she was voted the Union House Artist of the Month in December, 2020, for her self-portrait using oils on canvas. This week I am focusing on women working with textiles to make space for themselves in the world of fine art - a world historically dominated by a patriarchal traditional of oil-based paintings authored almost entirely by men. In ironic contrast, Bothma emphasizes her skill in traditional portraiture, while placing knitting and textiles at the core of her work.
Her pieces are often conceptualized purely on a particular material. A piece of rope or sample of knitting can be the starting place for her work. Or, it can be the other way around where the visceral qualities, especially of knitting and lace, are added to her work as part of a versatility visual language of expression. Her winning portrait last month shows Bothma breastfeeding, but she is covered by a handknit cape, so loosely stitched together, you can see her eyes peering out from behind the yarn. Her expression appears fearful and her artist statement confirms what she intends is to communicate is a fear of motherhood.
“Slow labor is undeniably a part of my process,” she says. “The repetitive nature of knitting, or the excruciatingly slow process of painting stiches and lace on canvass, mimics the labor involved in motherhood, the tedium of the everyday tasks involved in keeping tiny humans healthy and happy. It has become conceptually vital that there is an element of repetition and labor in my work.”
My assumption is she is a very good knitter because her paintings illustrate an intimate understanding of tension, and how it disperses over an entire row of stitching. “I am a knitter, albeit a bad one,” she says. “I just make it up as I go along, adding stitches when I feel like hoping the piece works in the end. I would never attempt to knit something wearable or useful,” says Bothma. Her exploration of knitting and textiles began when she started to look at female identity and relationships. “The so-called, “woman’s-work”, belonged to a woman’s domain and clearly demonstrated something about who woman are, and how women are supposed to be in relationships and in life,” she says. When she first cut up stockings and used them for knitting, she discovering a bodily, almost abject quality in the material itself. She also used beautiful lace. Between these two extremes, Bothma has come to use textiles as a language unto itself expressing the many different thoughts, and emotions around motherhood.
You can read more about Ilene Bothma in an aptly titled piece that speaks specifically to the theme of the ThirtyDayGallery this week, Stitching and Unpicking Ambivalences Toward Womanhood and Maternity in Work by Ilene Bothma, by Irene Bronner.
When I introduced the theme of textiles on Day 6 with artist Helena Wadsely, I wrote about the challenge woman face in making even a minimum wage when “slow labor” is involved in their artwork. Bothma remains challenged by the limitations of producing work that is time consuming, but her ability to make paintings that depict a tradition of woman and “slow labor” at the same time as expressing feelings, associating fear and loss with motherhood makes for good multidimensional art.
She
breaks what I often think of as “the romantic cult of motherhood” and brings aspects of the woman’s psyche to bear.
Bothma handles her subject matter with boldness and the proficiency of a master which is why for me, I think Bothma is an interesting art investment. Currently she has 11 works for sale on Artsy.net in the range of $2,500 USD.
Available Works
Please visit www.ilenebothma.com