What is the connection between the natural world and feminine power? Could the secret to countering climate change lie in women’s ability to nurture and cradle, just as nature does with all of us?
Looking at Bella Hoare’s first solo exhibition, titled A Different Green, is like breathing clean air. The plants, trees and flowers she draws not only give the sense of being immersed in a forested landscape, but they also express a new, feminist narrative of the green world.
AN INTIMATE CONNECTION BETWEEN GREEN WORLD AND FEMININE POWER
The show, curated by Becca Pelly-Fry, focused on over twenty works that explore the beauty of the female form alongside closely observed natural references to forests, leaves and flowers.
Woods have always played a central role in Bella’s life. “I grew up in the West Country, in a rural charter around the woods,” said the artist. “As a child, I spent long hours in the forests and gardens around Stourhead that surrounded my home. As an adult, the seasonal renewal of life has supported me through challenging times. This positive relationship between nature and feminine power is celebrated throughout my work.”
Bella is a fellow of the Royal Horticultural Society and a direct descendant of the renowned Georgian gardener Henry Hoare. Her garden at Gasper Cottage in Wiltshire is part of the Stourhead Estate, which celebrated 300 years in 2024. The Stourhead Garden now belongs to the National Trust. Gasper Cottage is also the name of her YouTube channel, which currently has about 1.5k subscribers. On that platform, Bella – who is a bank director in her everyday life – publishes a video of her garden every month, attracting thousands of views.
COMMUNICATING A FEMINIST NARRATIVE THROUGH ART
Bella’s love of gardening has grown hand in hand with her love of painting. “Art has always been my hobby. I spent a lot of time painting outdoors. I also used to do life drawing, which means drawing a human figure from a nude, live model. However, at a certain point of my life, I started to be more critical about my work. What were my paintings about? What was I trying to communicate? It turned out that they weren’t about anything.”
It was at that time that Bella became aware of how nature had been incredibly supportive during the most difficult period of her life. For that reason, nature should have been the absolute protagonist of her art.
“When I am close to nature I feel more myself. 2008 was a tough year for me: I lost my first husband in a car crash and my son was involved in the crash as well, so I had to nurse him for six months. During that time, going to the garden, into the woods, was a wonderful feeling.”
At the end of the day, as she says, spring does come. No matter how bad, cold and dark winter is, spring will eventually arrive. “Whatever you are going through, it will get better. This is what I wanted to say with my art.”
But why focus on women? “I see nature as a nurturing force, and many women in my life have been caring people,” she replies, revealing her interpretation of the feminine intimacy with the natural world. “Furthermore, the turning of the seasons reminds me of the different phases of a woman’s life and the stages of motherhood women go through. It’s all connected.”
MOTHER’S POWER AND BODY POSITIVITY
This idea is particularly evident in Cradled, a painting depicting an eight-and-a-half-month pregnant woman in the woods facing the viewer. “Ultimately, having a baby is a woman’s superpower,” said the artist, who started this piece in November 2023 and completed it in Spring 2024. “I have known the model for more than ten years, and working with her at that stage was special. She kept posing with her hand cradling her belly, which led me to make a connection with my personal experience because the forest nurtured me my whole life. I wanted to create the sense that this future mother is going to look after her baby, and the forest is cradling her in turn.”
This complementary relationship of giving and receiving between people and plants comes full circle when the author outlines how important it is that we take care of nature. Although not directly addressing the issue of climate change in her artworks, Bella’s commitment to the preservation of the natural world is loud and clear. “If you appreciate nature, then you want to preserve it.”
Plant life is a constant touchpoint for the artist, who offers a feminist perspective around it. In her series of Green Women, she reinterprets the Green Man figure of mediaeval Pagan-Christian folklore. The Green Man is a foliate head often carved onto church ceilings, with a face surrounded by leaves, sometimes depicted with flowers entering or leaving the mouth. “This symbol is about closeness to nature, but why is it always represented as a man?” asked the artist, considering this patriarchal narrative unacceptable and unreasonable. “It should be a woman.”
Among the paintings of this series, Old Eyes will catch your attention. The panel depicts the face of a mature woman, coloured with different shades of green, with wrinkles resembling the branches or roots of a tree. The comparison with a tree is intentional, and intended to reflect the wisdom and knowledge that increase with age.
Looking closely, the viewer will also be surprised to discover the technique the artist used. Bella is close to the Impressionist movement for her use of broken colour, yet she has developed a very distinctive style. Working on board with oil and cold wax medium, she builds up layers of pigment using both a brush and direct application to achieve highly textured surfaces. By applying thin layers over thick and vice versa, she creates images with great depth and shadow.
Her purpose is to make the surfaces less shiny, thereby enhancing the colours used. From a distance, the paintings appear precise and detailed. However, upon closer inspection, the paint surfaces reveal complexity: there are crevices, marks, shadows, and the images dissolve into abstract whorls of textured paint. The women she depicts are anything but perfect, yet still beautiful. This conveys a message of body positivity: “We are all more interesting the closer you look,” the artist said.
THE GLASSHOUSE AND THE HEALING POWER OF HORTICULTURE
With the portraits of five female members of The Glasshouse, Bella takes the human connection with the non-human world a step further. The Glasshouse is a social enterprise that offers second chances through horticultural training to women in UK prisons. Not only do they use the power of botany to improve the prisoners’ mental and physical wellbeing, but they also install and maintain plant displays for offices, hospitality and retail sectors. In this way, they reintegrate the prisoners into the workforce and help rebuild their lives.
The artist discovered this project when her office became a client of The Glasshouse. Immediately, she envisioned an artistic collaboration and decided to approach the non-profit organisation. “As an artist working to celebrate the relationship between femininity and the power of nature, it was a revelation to come across The Glasshouse,” said Bella. “I was privileged to spend time with, draw and photograph five of these remarkable women. They are all at different stages of life, each with complex and diverse stories, and most importantly, they are determined to embrace the second chance offered by The Glasshouse.”
Each woman – whose identity remains anonymous – is associated with a particular plant specimen, chosen by the artist according to the sitter’s preferences and personality. In Deceptively Delicate, the delicacy and toughness Bella perceived in the model are well represented by small, wild roses, which are soft, fragrant and beautiful, but as Bella noted, “the plant in itself is a survivor, and this is what I’ve seen in her.”
In Glowing, the artist expresses the feeling of the sun on the prisoner’s skin, something she confided to miss, by using light and drawing the canna flower, which grows in the August sunshine. In Autumn Glory, the sitter is represented with two leaves of her favourite plant, Monstera deliciosa, in autumnal bronze. “I decided to use copper following a nice conversation we had. We are exactly the same age and we were discussing how the marks time leaves on you make you more beautiful. It’s not just aging, it’s patterning!” Bella joked.
The last two portraits of The Glasshouse series are Dressed in Spring and Summer Purples. The first depicts a young girl who has already spent her ‘winter’ in prison and now embodies the freshness and energy of spring. “I wanted to paint her in the acid green of early Spring with little leaves to give a sense of new growth”. Once again, the changing seasons reflect the inevitable return of light from dark moments in life. The last portrait is inspired by purple and late Summer, two of the model’s favourite things, represented by large clematis flowers.
“The five portraits are on a monumental scale because what these women are doing is heroic to me,” Bella said. They are depicted in larger-than-life-size images, a genre traditionally reserved for the wealthy and famous. By monumentalising these women from marginalised communities, Bella aims to dismantle viewers’ preconceptions and emphasise their potential for growth. They represent the opportunities for renewal offered by the natural world. “Recently, one of them told me that knowing I was working on her portrait had hugely helped her mental health. I am very proud of that,” she said. “I truly hope my work honours their strength, endeavours, endurance, bravery and, most of all, their femininity.”
With her art, the author of A Different Green showcases that feminine power and natural world are bonded by a fundamental and nurturing connection. She highlights it from several perspectives, from motherhood to body positivity, from questioning patriarchy to social rehabilitation. Leaves, flowers and forests become in this way an expression of feminism.
This article is part of our newest Climate Change series, Women for Climate. To read more inspiring stories of everyday women making a real difference in the world, be sure to check out the latest edition of Wempower magazine, or listen to our podcast.
