“Come to terms with death, thereafter anything is possible.”- Albert Camus

With her latest body of work, artist Ilené Bothma lifts the veil on the particular anxieties of motherhood, as well as its inextricable love. 'Life, Death and All the Fear In-Between' is a series of extraordinarily detailed portraits of her two young children, herself and her husband – all seemingly peacefully asleep. The translucent skin and the poses of the sleepers, with their hands resting gently on their chests, or their forms obscured under fabric, give us pause, though. Are they only asleep? 

Ilené uses the conceit of these somnolent subjects to explore in oil paint and watercolour one of the central tenets of human life: the deeply existential angst around dying and, more specifically, the death of loved ones.

The exhibition title draws on the concept proposed by anthropologist Ernest Becker in his 1973 book, 'The Denial of…