With these works Eva creates awareness around life cycles and eco systems within the female body as a source of hope and inspiration. She offers a new perspective in a time of constant transformation by questioning our shame, guild, loneliness and grief.

Birth, life, death, rebirth as a natural cycle.

Eva: “I explore these themes in my art to invite a grounded sense of trust in letting go. I feel that through this practice I’m learning ways to make space for new phases, feelings and visions to sprout like seedlings.”

With these drawings Eva invites the viewer to remember the beauty and strength of the female body and the portal of life, death and rebirth. Not by making it pretty, but by showing the rawness of her human experience.

Bartels’ mission with these works is also to create physical expression of the rawness and the physical torture the female body endures whilst birthing or having a miscarriage.

The blood drawings are created with monthly menstrual blood of the artist to emphasise the power of resilience and the force of creation that’s flowing through the female body. She captures scenes of loss such as her miscarriage but also scenes of pleasure and moments of silent grief. You will see women in her drawings making connection to their natural state of being and just observing themselves and the process of their bodies.

Eva draws parallels between birthing animals in the wild and the ‘human woman’ as we know her. Because art history has been dominated by men who have carefully left out these depictions of women in their wildest and perhaps most natural states.