BELLA MALIM
ACTS OF CREATION
‘Bella’s paintings embody precisely this tension: they reveal motherhood as both sanctuary and battleground, at once the most elemental and the most overlooked of creative acts.’
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Visiting Bella Malim’s Acts of Creation is to find oneself in dialogue not only with the artist, but with a lineage of images of motherhood that stretches back centuries. From Raphael’s tender Madonnas to Käthe Kollwitz’s unflinching prints of grief, from Mary Cassatt’s bourgeois intimacies to Jenny Saville’s muscular reinterpretations, motherhood has long been an arena where artists negotiate the boundaries of tenderness and truth.
Bella situates herself squarely in this continuum, but with a modern candour that strips away sentiment. As she says:
“Motherhood for me has been the most challenging and rewarding experience of my life. I wanted to create a body of work that looked at many of the tiny moments that have made up my experience. I have included other women that I love, children that I know and love, pets who are alive, pets who died, bathtime, and favourite toys. The largest and most sustained works are my modern-day Madonnas… tongue-in-cheek homages to the genre I adore.”
Yet Bella’s vision is not the Madonna purified for devotion, nor the mother softened for domestic reverie. Instead, we see children mid-tantrum, women worn with fatigue, and pets laid out for funeral rites. The palette is restrained, almost stoical, and the brushwork bold, marks made by a hand accustomed to resilience. In places, Bella’s children are collaborators: her son, navigating his own learning difficulties, contributes not just as subject but as painter, helping to externalise his feelings.
This exhibition, then, is not an exercise in idealisation, but a rejoinder to it. As Hettie Judah has argued in her ground-breaking curatorial work on motherhood, to look at the maternal honestly is to confront the messy, the contradictory, the sublime and the unbearable. Bella’s paintings embody precisely this tension: they reveal motherhood as both sanctuary and battleground, at once the most elemental and the most overlooked of creative acts.
It is humbling to consider that these works were made in the margins of an already demanding life: a single mother running a farm in a male-dominated world, now also staking her claim in an art world similarly slanted. The duality of her role, protector and nurturer, farmer and painter, is written into every canvas.
Bella Malim’s Acts of Creation is not nostalgia, nor even a memoir. It is a truth-telling in paint: raw, unsparing, but profoundly moving. In its refusal to sanitise, it aligns itself with the highest calling of art, to strip away myth and reveal the human condition as it truly is.
Hester Baldwin - Managing Director 2025
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