When was younger, her primary focus was making the best work she was capable of. “Now, it occurs to me that I am part of a continuum,” she says. “It’s the feeling I have when I am making stuff that is the important thing—the process… That’s what we do as artists, right? Lay the groundwork for the next generation.”
Bothwell often collaborates with her husband, Robert Bender, who adds wood elements to her dreamlike glass and ceramic pieces (). She applies botanical details and other small features in oil paint, creating a mixed-media world of ethereal figures and spiritual, interspecies interactions.
Recently, Bothwell experienced a sudden health issue that threw her off her axis and derailed her studio practice. She says, “I felt disconnected from my creativity, and it even seemed pointless to make art at all, like, ‘Why bother?’” Eventually, though, she realized how much she missed being in the studio and how playing around with materials enlivened her mind and spirit.
“These days, I feel keenly that it is a privilege just to make art, to see and be moved by beauty,” Bothwell says. She began working on a series of seashell sculptures with figures nestled inside them, which were deeply personal, metaphorical visions of emerging from one’s own safety zone to experience the unknown of the wider world. She sculpts each shell out of beeswax, eventually casting them in glass. The figures, on the other hand, are made from .
Bothwell is currently working on sculptures that encourage letting go of the past and making space for new ideas, focusing on themes of ease, change, and courage. Explore more on the artist’s .
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