Laila Egbers

Death of Innocence (okt, 2026)

Death of Innocence combines sculptural art with the medium of taxidermy. A brown rabbit is cradled in a pond, surrounded by water and lilies. It’s neither dead nor alive but rather captured in a lingering state of limbo.

Its back is unmade, and under a bridge of bones a small world is hidden within the beautiful and grotesque. In its heart lives a girl by the stream, encapsulated by the seemingly lovely beguilement of a flower and her faith in the ground beneath her. Every tree surrounding her, every blade of grass, is merely a mycelium made up of tens of thousands of hands, frozen in the wait. Alone, in all the genuineness and naivety she holds, quiet rustling of the leaves, a single breath.

The world is gone in a matter of a second, only a twisting and grasping ocean remains. And then it’s coiled back into shape, and the forest is empty. No one hears the muffled screams from what is far beneath the forest floor. In its stomach, she decays, caught in the Venus flytrap. Consumed by the hidden structure of the world she so admired.

It cries, it cries tears of red pearls that grow to take the body over. It cries as innocence dies and bleeds into the tainting of another pure white.

Jorōgumo (sep-okt, 2026)

Jorōgumo, the spider woman, is a supernatural creature originating from Japanese mythology.

A beautiful face could be hiding something bleak behind the fleshy pretence of human skin. Shimmering, ebon eyes could be a glassy corneal veil that covers up all the small pupils watching from behind.

This piece of the same name is an art doll in the form a girl made out of sugar. Her glittering, opaline pink skin is laced with frosting and sweets.

A melting illusion that distracts from the atrous, skeletal limbs that creep out from under that hide. Her eyes stare out into the world, yet don’t seem to belong in the sweetness of her surrounding features. Like they’re staring from somewhere deeper within, beyond the skin of the mimic where something cold, hard and chitinous is waiting in utter stillness.

When the sugar starts melting away, the chatelaine climbs out from the opened up chambers of her heart. She is glazing and adorning her jagged skeleton, hiding the threat from view. All that remains are quiet, appraising eyes. Shining.

Deliquescence (jun-jul, 2026)

Deliquescence depicts a human head, slowly dissolving and decomposing, like a salt rock formation melting away.

Skin, veins, and blood drip into the silence, making way for the endless structure spiralling deeper down to the core, into dark cavities, too vast to make out what may, or may not, be lingering in the depths.

This sculpture explores the inner world of liminal dreams that is burrowing within every single one of us, twisting and growing like a creature that infests our minds after dark.

Where do we end and does this parasite begin, if we can never tell with certain conviction whether the world you are seeing in this very moment, is an illusion or not?

Claustrophobia (jul-aug, 2026)

Claustrophobia, a painting taking inspiration from the fairy tale of Little Red Riding Hood.

Claustrophobia, the fear of being in a small, enclosed space.
The fear of not being able to move,
not being able to breathe,
suffocated in the spiralling grasp of terror.
Terror like a maelstrom of ice cold blades pulling me down,
right through the centre of me until the ice is in the pit of my stomach
pulling me down.
Further.
Pulling right through the surface of the ground.
The fear of feeling my surroundings,
press on every cell of my skin.
Feeling it beyond that, pressure in my body,
like my bones will turn to water and swirl down into the pit inside of me.
Pressure,
wrenching the air from my lungs
wrenching the water out my eyes.
Pressure,
gripping the flesh from my bones until there’s left nothing to call my own.
Pressure pushing me down until it touches the pit of me,
until I’m nothing but a single point in space,
a single point of everything there is to me,
everything pressure left me to hide before it crushed
what I used to think I was.

Bathing in Drowning (apr-jun, 2026)

Bathing in Drowning is a symbiosis of two tragic love stories, Ophelia from Shakespeare’s Hamlet and the Little Mermaid, merging together in their final scene. The Little mermaid in the ocean, dissolving into seafoam scattered across the waves, Ophelia floating in a stream surrounded by flowers.

The story of Ophelia takes place in the organs of the human body, whereas the Little Mermaid exists in the structure within the fishtail bursting out from the water.

The girl is sinking, slowly dissolving into foam as the world around her slips away. The water burns and corrodes her skin with everything it takes from her, but she stays perfectly still as the sting is all she has ever known.

To her it’s a tragic beauty, a romantic picture of death. It is overflowing with the aestheticisation that she has woven around herself to keep the hurt from senselessness. Imagine being enveloped in a story where pain is nothing but a poetic element.

She is caught up in the splendour of it, bathing in the drowning in it. Staring at the lights behind her eyes, she never sees how her woven threads lock her in under the lily beds.

The Autopsy (jul-okt, 2025)

The Autopsy centres around Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, drawing upon the theme of a confusing, dreamlike world paired with childlike innocence. Wonderland does not exist as a dream or different reality but is physically growing and twisting within Alice herself.

Blue rubber gloves, the harsh, medicinal smell of formaldehyde and disinfectants, and shiny, metal tools stained with marrow.

Clinically dissecting and removing, extracting bits and pieces of an aggressively exposed inner world. A world being altered, violated, and broken into new shapes according to the whims and desires of others.

The uniqueness of a person, slowly being degraded, taken apart for the sake of control.The smell of rubber and the cold, and no ability to intervene in the process of one’s authentic self twisting into something no longer recognisable. Inability to speak up about what is no longer inside to express.

And in the silence, as the tools are left on the table and the darkness of the mortuary refrigerator encloses her, there blooms a quiet yet consuming ressentiment.
Never knowing into what her world would have grown if it had been left to flourish freely.

Tearing Silk Threads (mar-apr, 2026)

Tearing Silk Threads is a smaller piece that focusses on the story of Cinderella, depicting her silk gown flowing like ripples into the dark.

The dress is the physical manifestation of her true identity growing out from the intricate world and story inside of her after years of repression, like spider’s silk threads woven into a beautiful structure surrounding them.

It symbolizes the flow of a single moment of creation and the passion of true self-expression.

It transforms her into a beautiful phantom, untouchable for what once held her back.

Beauty in Withered Roses (dec 2025-jan 2026)

Beauty in Withered Roses utilizes the widely known image of the Sleeping Beauty, ensnared in a deadly slumber, covered in roses. Imagine their overwhelming scent in the air, preserving her in the moment forever.

After countless years, she remains the same, similar to how dried roses never lose their elegance. Inside of her, the story of her life unfolds, but it breaks up and distorts the further down you go, like she is being consumed from the inside out.

The piece is musing on the beauty that lies within death, in an endless, frozen, funereal moment where the only living thing is complete and utter silence that slowly eats away at everything. When the self shrinks down and deteriorates and little clocks are ticking to a stop until time stands still forever.

A picture of contrast between the horrors of death and the conflicting grace that lies within it.

Don't look above (okt 2025-jan 2026)