Published 19 August 2025 in News
Nel
Ilené Bothma Solo Exhibition: Mirror Mirror
Nel
117 Long Street, Cape Town City Centre 8001 Cape Town, South Africa
04 September - 03 October 2025
Opening 04 September 2025 @ 17:30 (SAST)
"To immerse oneself in water is to surrender—to be held by a force both gentle and unforgiving. Water becomes mirror, boundary, and passage: cleansing, obscuring, transforming.
This exhibition emerges from the landscape of grief following a divorce—an emotional rupture that left the artist untethered. Making became a way through. The works are shaped by the tension between fragmentation and endurance, disappearance and survival.
At the center is a hand-built black ceramic suit of armor: fragile, suspended, quietly defiant. In a photographic series, the artist wears this armor underwater, performing a ritual of surrender and transformation. The weight threatens to pull her down, even as the water offers release.
These images recall Ophelia—not as a passive symbol of madness, but as an active descent. Here, the artist chooses the water, carries her grief, and surfaces altered but whole. The submersion holds both serenity and struggle, dissolution and becoming.
A black oval textile mirror edged in gold reflects a fractured self. Beadwork, bubbles, and ceramic spheres echo throughout—symbols of breath, fragility, and the suspended state of grief. Their shimmer speaks to containment and release, pain and clarity.
The title Mirror Mirror draws from the Snow White fairy tale, but reframes the question. The mirror no longer asks, “Who is the fairest?” but instead, “Who have I become?” It becomes a surface of reckoning, where beauty, identity, and power blur.
Through sculpture, image, and textile, the exhibition invites viewers into a liminal space—a slow process of undoing and reassembling. Not resolution, but the radical persistence of staying afloat."
For more information please navigate to the Nel website here