Abstract
Ilené Bothma knits with nylon stockings, stitches with human hair, and performs interventional actions with household furniture. Many of her canvases are vintage handkerchiefs and stockings. The body - specifically female and maternal bodies - is everywhere signalled, but seldom present. The artist also produces meticulously detailed, naturalistic paintings of her own and others' knitting, embroidery and crochet. Her delicate patterning with hair and her paintings of fabric soiled by bodily fluids provide a reflective tension within her work that speaks to how narratives of gendered roles and identities are written into representation. What the artist calls her 'deliberately bad knitting' is central here (Bothma 2020b). Bothma also creates a narrative for the work itself, encouraging possibilities for the interpretation of creative labour. As Valerie Mainz and Griselda Pollock (2000:3) put it, 'attention [is] given here to the work process by which an image is itself produced'. What emerges is a foregrounding of women's ambivalence.
Highlights
Ilené Bothma knits with nylon stockings, stitches with human hair, and performs interventional actions with household furniture
My interpretation here is influenced by Bothma’s own declared interest in the abject, in a Kristevan sense of the term, as a means of framing her oeuvre (Bothma 2020b). It is from a relationship with the abject that the artist introduces a particular quality of story-telling, of presenting a testifying narrative that remains – in some ways, dangerously – open-ended
Bothma’s affinity with the Kristevan concept of the abject bears some elaboration in order to lay the groundwork for a sustained engagement with her textile-based works
Summary
Ilené Bothma knits with nylon stockings, stitches with human hair, and performs interventional actions with household furniture. This is a dissecting, searching gaze that, in the meticulous washes of watercolour paint, uses water as a base (as opposed for instance to oil or acrylic paints) in order to parody the transformation of the substances deemed abject by historic discourse (such as female or infant fluids) into a more apparently “coherent”, cultured expression of “art” in the form of a painterly surface.
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