Parto Sagrado, painting, Fabriano Tela Paper 300g
Copyright 2026, Zoa Monher, All Rights reserved.

Parto Sagrado is Zoe Monher’s colorful painting that reimagines the Pièta, the classic Christian theme seen most famously in works such as Michelangelo’s sculpture of Mary and Jesus at Saint Peter’s Basilica, Vatican City. Instead of capturing a profound moment of death and morning, however, Monher’s work celebrates life and the birthing body. Michelangelo’s triangular shape of Mary holding Jesus is inverted in Monher’s work, showing the birthing mother surrounded by supportive women in a triangular geometric composition around her. Monher’s Artsy page describe’s the artist’s meaning in the painting:

The work reinterprets the iconographic structure of the Pietà, shifting its focus from mourning to birth. The reclining body no longer holds the dead son, but instead crosses the threshold of childbirth. Through this inversion, the work challenges the passivity traditionally assigned to the birthing body and reclaims birth as a physical, ritual, and transformative event.

The union of the Sun and the Moon places the scene at the moment preceding a transmutation. The Moon begins to turn red, while the Sun appears enveloped in a protective blue mantle. Between these two principles, childbirth emerges as the simultaneous birth of a new life and a new identity.

The reference to Artemis introduces the figure of a guardian who watches over the threshold and accompanies moments of risk. In doing so, the work points to a contemporary absence: while attention is focused on the newborn, the person who has given birth is often left overlooked in the aftermath of this transformation.

Parto Sagrado calls for an ethics of care that recognizes childbirth as a collective experience. Motherhood is no longer represented as silent sacrifice, but affirmed as a force that requires support, community, and protection.

Pregnant women, especially those on the cusp of birth, can look to Monher’s painting for an image of childbirth as an empowering, supportive moment in their lives. The colors Monher uses are bold and accentuate the strength of the birthing moment depicted.

Zoa Monher is a Spanish artist born in the Canary Islands. She holds a Master’s degree in Graphic Design from the University of Madrid (2021) and graduated in Fine Arts from the University of Salamanca in 2019. More of her work may be seen through her Artsy page and her Instagram page.

The National Museum of Ireland has a Digital Heritage Library in which 3D versions of the sheelas it owns (the museum owns 17) can be seen, and the Clonmel Sheela is one of them. Like all of her sisters, the Clonmel Sheela is a powerful stone figure that depicts a woman with her vulva outstretched. As written in numerous posts here, as well as in other academic and popular texts, the stance of the sheela could be connected to a representation depicting the birthing process and the physiological capabilities of the vulva during birth. There are other interpretations of the figure, but the interpretation of sheelas as birthing figures is both popular and potent for those who are pregnant. There is often a worry during pregnancy that the birthing mother will be unable to birth the baby due to its size. Objects such as the Clonmel Sheela encourage women and anyone who is pregnant to understand that the physiology of the body is transformative during birth, and indeed an infant can be born from the vulva.

I am currently researching details on the Clonmel Sheela and have learned from the “Documenting The Sheela-Na-Gigs of Ireland” page (Ireland’s Síla na Giġ) that the Clonmel Sheela was found during renovations in the wall of a bank at Blue Anchor Lane in Clonmel. I will post more information about this Sheela when I have it.

For Visualizing Birth’s other posts on the Sheela-na-gig, see also: Calmness and Strength in the Birthing Figure of the Sheela-na-gig (2010); Visualizing Birth through the Sheela-na-gig (2014); Revisiting the Sheela-na-gig (2020); Visualizing Birth through Project Sheela (2022); Visualizing Birth through the image of a Sheela-na-gig/Celtic Knot convergence (2025).

Artist Jiabao Li’s solo exhibition Womb Wetware is currently on view through August 22nd at San Francisco’s TIAT (The Intersection of Art and Technology) gallery. On Thursday, August 6, 2026, Li along with four other artists convened in a hybrid event at the gallery, two in-person and two on Zoom, to present a panel discussion, “Motherhood as Medium,” which explored the intersection of pregnancy, birth, technology, reproduction, and mothering.* Through shared video and imagery, the artists offered audience members a look at their latest work, while visitors had access to Li’s work onsite. All of the artists examined issues related to how pregnancy and birth are treated in the arts and by society more broadly.

Jiabao Li presented discussed several of her projects that a part of her Womb Wetware exhibit. Li’s primary focus is on the intersection of pregnancy, motherhood, and technology,  and some of the artworks that she spoke about and which were available to audience members included her Super Mom Training Gym, a video game that she made when she was nine months pregnant by using a 3D body scan of herself as the player character. The game satirizes societal pressure on mothers to appear effortlessly capable, or superhuman, while they are pregnant. In reality, Li talked about how she could barely bend down to tie her shoes when she was in her third trimester. But in the game, her pregnant self can jump, leap and flip. Li also discussed AI Mom, her interactive piece available onsite where visitors choose and converse with an AI mother. The piece, which includes tone sliders, allows spectators the opportunity to choose the type of mom they would like to hear speaking. Li’s Rock Womb, Lotus Womb, also available to view onsite, is a very different type of piece, comprising a series of small figurines through which the artist weaves mythological themes related to virgin births, miraculous conceptions and pregnancies across cultures. These connect ancient ideas of reproduction without the body to today’s biotech ambitions related to pregnancy and birth.

One of the other artworks that she did not discuss at length was her 4D Baby project, part of an optic illusion installation she created with mathematician Fumiko Futamura, which included several pieces, one of which is available above. On the object label next to 4D Baby, Li and Futamura explain:

Pregnancy is a four-dimensional transformation. Duchamp had Rrose Sélavy as a female counterpart, a fourth-dimensional version of himself. When a penis is turned inside out, it becomes a vagina. When Duchamp is turned inside out, he becomes Rrose. What, then, is the fourth-dimensional version of a pregnant body, of me? In space, turning a pregnant body inside out brings the baby out. In time, that same transformation is birth.

This installation uses optical illusion to stage that shift. From a distance, the belly appears convex and the baby is outside. As the viewer approaches and moves to the side, the belly reveals itself as concave and the baby slips back inside. In another variation, the baby appears outside when viewed from an angle, but when the viewer moves directly above the belly, the baby is inside. Distance becomes pregnancy. Movement becomes birth. Space becomes time. By walking away from the sculpture, the viewer performs the act of birth. 

For the purposes of visualizing birth, pregnant viewers can look at 4D Baby and envision nurturing the fetuses within their bodies. The lighting and feeling of Li and Futamura’s 4D Baby is one of lightness, softness, and glow. Visualizing the unborn child, those who are pregnant can imagine their own fetus basking in a glow within their own wombs.

Jiabao Li’s Womb Wetware exhibit is on view at the TIAT through August 22nd. More images from the show are available below. For more information on Jiabao Li and the artists present at the August 6th TIAT event, see their individual websites: Yoon Chung Han, Jiabao Li, Lauren Lee McCarthy, and Sputniko!

*A small portion of the material from this post is also found in another review I wrote of the 4-artist panel Motherhood as Medium and Jiabao Li’s Womb Wetware exhibit, which I attended on August 6th in San Francisco. That review may be found here.

After the birth of her son, Artist-Scholar Barbara Gabriella Renzi (“Lule”), created several works as part of her Where Women Became Earth series (see second image below). Devoted to depicting her sensations, feelings, and impressions of her own birthing body and post-birthing sentiments, the images merge representations of the human body with those of land and sky. In Where Women Become Earth I (above), which Renzi created using wax crayon and pencil on paper, the artist renders a raw image of a woman in nature, her body blending with and becoming the earth. The woman’s body is full and appears to breathe or contract with the natural world.

In addition to serving as representations of full pregnancy and birth, Renzi’s images serve to tell a story of how art can serve as a powerful tool to the processing of birth after it has been experienced. For many who give birth, strong emotions and sentiments follow the experience. Having an artistic outlet to work through these feelings can empower women as they think about what their bodies have been through. Renzi explains the meaning of her works and how important the art making process was for her following the birth of her son. In the artist’s case, she experienced obstetric violence and making art helped her to rebirth herself following a traumatic birth.

These paintings were born from the image of woman as earth: a body that receives, shelters, transforms, and brings life into the world. Motherhood appears here not only as a biological experience, but as an ancient force of nourishment, endurance, tenderness, and renewal.

The women do not simply inhabit the landscape; they become it. Their bodies unfold into fields, roots, hills, and fertile ground. They carry life as the earth carries seeds, nourishing the world through touch, memory, presence, and love.

These images emerged during a fragile and painful period of my life, after a traumatic birth and a time of profound disorientation. Painting became a quiet place where I could return to myself. Through colour and form, fear slowly softened into tenderness, pain became movement, and silence found a voice.

I worked with simple materials: wax crayons and coloured pencils, tools connected to childhood, immediacy, and instinct. Their simplicity allowed me to create without judgement, before technique, before explanation, following only the need to give shape to what could not yet be spoken.

These works tell a story of transformation: of women becoming earth, and of suffering becoming a path towards healing. The mother appears as the one who nourishes the world, but also as someone who must herself be held, protected, listened to, and cared for.

In these paintings, the body is soil and memory, wound and shelter, darkness and beginning.

I had a very difficult labour. I was induced without really knowing what was being done, and the whole process was extremely long. The baby was turned the wrong way – we were back to back – and everything that could go wrong seemed to go wrong. The epidural was badly administered, the gas ran out, and in the end I had to undergo an emergency caesarean section. Thank God, my baby was finally born safely.

A few days later, I began to feel very unwell. I did not understand what was happening to me, and I also started hearing voices. I rushed to the doctor, who prescribed antidepressants. I only took them at the beginning, but then I stopped because they made me feel as if I was living in hell.

All I wanted to do was paint. It was the only thing that soothed me and gave me some relief. I dreamed of women becoming the earth that nourishes us, and that is what I painted. In these drawings, I used wax crayons and children’s coloured pencils, and for the yellow woman I used oil pencils.

Art helped me to put myself back together, and later I went on to study psychology. Of course, what I have shared with you is very personal, but I felt it was important to explain how significant art has been in my life and the role it played during that period.

After three or four months, I felt completely well again, but the experience made me appreciate art in a new way. I had always painted and drawn, but I had never given it the importance it deserved.

Like her artwork, Renzi’s words and story about how she went through birth are helpful to others as they visualize birth and post-birth.

Dr. Barbara Gabriella Renzi is a philosopher, artist, and psychologist whose work explores the intersections of feminist aesthetics, embodiment, and myth. She holds PhDs from Roma Tre University and Queen’s University Belfast and teaches philosophy, psychology, and cultural studies in Germany and the UK. Her current research examines motherhood, natality, and the feminist sublime in art and literature, with a focus on how mythic and religious narratives shape experiences of birth and becoming. Much of Renzi’s scholarly work is available online. See this page for more information on her artwork and artistic practice.

For other Visualizing Birth posts on the power of making birth art before or after birth, see, for example: Making Birth Art at Home; Chrissy Foreman’s “Landscape of Birth” and Transformations of Pain and Fear; Visualizing the Mind/Body Connection through Sarah Ulrich’s “Birthing Quilt”; and The Work of Amber delaine: Visualizing Birth Through Color.

Where Women Become Earth, wax crayon and oil pencil on paper
Copyright 2009, Barbara Gabriella Renzi, All Rights reserved.

Russian artist Nadezhda Dvornikova, who has studied environmental design, creates gorgeous and mesmerizing paintings, many of which look like mandalas. In The Birth of Something New. The Seed of Life., we see a series of circles that overlap and encompass one another, emanating from a flower-like central image colored in a golden orange and silvery white. The circles, which are colored in an array of blues, teals, whites, and silvers are calming to look at and allow the viewers’ eyes to be both drawn to the center and attracted to the multiple layers of smooth roundness.

For those who are pregnant, the image is helpful, in part because it is calming but also because the circular shapes and central flower image elicit a feeling of dilation. Visualizing Birth has previously discussed how these types of images can be very powerful and helpful during late pregnancy and even during labor itself. During my second pregnancy, a series of blooming flower images produced by David Bookbinder ended up being very helpful to me in a very similar way when I was actually in labor (see Blooming Flower Visualizations from 2011)

From the Artsy.net website, Dvornikova explains some of the meaning in her work:  

My paintings are a meta-message from the future, from your highest timeline of reality. They are meant to be felt with the heart — through resonance with the Spirit, which reveals the painting you need in the present moment.

The Amove Gallery in London submitted Dvornika’s work to Artsy.net and further explains who the artist is and what her work is about:

Nadezhda Dvornikova is a symbolist and quantum artist working in transformational art. Her practice explores the inner world, spiritual awakening, and the reconnection between the human being, nature, and the universe. She lives and works in Moscow. Nadezhda studied painting at an art school in her hometown and later graduated in Environmental Design in 2012. Art has accompanied her throughout her life, and she began painting consciously in 2022. Her artistic language is based on ornamental compositions and sacred geometry, reflecting the structure of the universe, the unity of humanity with nature, the light of the Soul, and the possibility of creating a new world founded on love.
Through her works, she invites viewers to connect with their inner Self: symbols, forms, and colors awaken self-knowledge, restore a sense of true nature, and strengthen connection with Spirit. Her art speaks to those seeking spiritual development, inner harmony, and a balanced home environment aligned with the energies of nature and the cosmos.

Nadezhda also creates meditative, neuro-practice-based paintings and leads art-meditation masterclasses focused on creating “state-paintings.” Participants often share feelings of joy, harmony, reduced anxiety, and a renewed sense of connection after the sessions.

Her works are held in private collections in the USA, Germany, and Russia. She was included among the 100 contemporary artists in the 2024 edition of the Encyclopedia of 100 Masters of Contemporary Art of the 21st Century and received 3rd place at the international exhibition World of Esotericism (Moscow, 2023).

I was unable to find a personal webpage or more extensive information about Nadezhda Dvornikova. However, she did have a page on the Artsy.net website, which is available here.

Çiğdem Menteşoğlu creates art about a variety of subjects. Some of her work, which is about childbirth, is dreamlike and surreal, bringing the viewer into liminal spaces of birth, death and rebirth through the artist’s canvases. In Transformation, which Menteşoğlu created between 2018-2019, a fleshly female form stands out as the main subject on the canvas. Squeezing a large, ripe fruit between her lifted legs, the form lies next to a tranquil pool of water, behind which stands a dusky landscape and nighttime sky. In the pool of water, we make out a face, which appears both as a reflection of the moon and a head peeking out from the blue ripples.

In our correspondences, Menteşoğlu has described the meaning of her representations in Transformation as related to rebirth of the mother-self during childbirth:

This is a scene of birth. imagination or interpretation of the childbirth. It’s said that when a child is born, a mother is also born. The woman dies, the mother-woman is born. From a feminist perspective, you take on a new personality, that is, you reconstruct yourself. The “you-other” theme is emerging here. A balloon-like image is seen between the woman’s legs. I created a story where this balloon bursts, the baby’s hand rises during the burst, and simultaneously the woman’s face blurs, drowning in the water peacefully. Focusing on the orange balloon-like image indicating the belly and the dark landscape with cypress trees in the background symbolizing death and the afterlife, I tried to layer three events/happenings on the same canvas surface.

Menteşoğlu is more broadly interested in relationships–both interpersonal interrelationships as well as relationships with other aspects of the world, such as nature, love, bonding, and experiences, including spiritual experience. She sees childbirth as an experience unique to women and began exploring the topic after becoming a mother herself.

For those who are pregnant, the forms and colors of Menteşoğlu’s artwork are calming to look at. Furthermore, the ripeness of the birthing mother figure–a ripeness bursting in the form of the fruit or balloon-like structure held between the figure’s legs–brings to mind the moment of birth during which time the infant crowns and is released into the world. 

Giving birth is an otherworldly experience, tinged with the sublime and the surreal, a magical moment captured in Meneteşoğlu’s paintings and artwork.

Çiğdem Menteşoğlu is an artist and professor based in Thessaloniki, Greece and in Turkey. To view more of her artwork, check out her Instagram page here.

Visualizing Birth returns again to the important birth art of Loie Hollowell (see also Visualizing dilation and birth in the art of Loie Hollowell and Visualizing Pregnancy in the at of Loie Hollowell). Hollowell’s Belly, breast, face, brain, milk ducts, placenta, while abstract, as is much of her other work, also offers the viewer representational features such as breasts, faces, brain, and embryonic images. The colors, which are both warm and cool, are calming to look at and invite the views to explore the bodily forms.

For those who are pregnant, there is a voluptuousness in the shapes that Hollowell creates, reminding them of their own multifaceted bodies, which hold so many capabilities during pregnancy and the postpartum period. The breasts are the nurturers of life, and the faces in Hollowell’s image appear to suckle. All of the forms are brought together towards the bottom center of the panel at the red focal point, which could be the vulva or womb. The maternal brain is a fascinating organ, its special plasticity written about, connected to the physiological processes of pregnancy and birth, as well as the processes of bonding during the postpartum period. 

This particular piece actually stands out three dimensionally, which is not apparent from this version of the image. A video on Instagram shows Hollowell’s image more fully, revealing that the blue mound protrudes from the panel.

More of Loie Hollowell’s works may be seen on her website or through the Pace Gallery.

Back in 2022, I came across a Benny Bufano original Madonna sculpture in San Francisco’s Fort Mason park (see Visualizing Birth through Benny Bufano’s “Madonna”). Recently, I was driving out near San Francisco State University on Brotherhood Way and came across Bufano’s Statue of Peace, which in the 1960s was erected at the San Francisco Airport and then relocated to Brotherhood Way in 2014. I did not take a picture and am using Chris Carlsson’s from the Benny Bufano on Public Art Page at the Found SF website.

As in the case of Bufano’s Madonna sculpture written about here in 2022, the artist’s Statue of Peace provides pregnant and other viewers with a calming image of a mother, whose body appears to enfold one or more colorful children. Her bust protrudes slightly towards the top of the sculpture beneath her glowing head and face. She appears serene and powerful, reminding mothers-to-be of their own capacities as they approach labor and birth.

At this time of war in the United States, with our government unlawfully attacking Iran and other countries, Bufano’s work stands out as a reminder of how our people need to stand up for peace. In this quote from the Found SF website on Bufano’s work, we see that the artist wanted democracies to stand up for peace, and he saw the need as connected to a reminder of protecting the women and children off our world. But it is up to the people at this point since we are witnessing the collapse of our entire leadership and governmental infrastructure during late stage capitalism:

Bufano was a very strong voice for social change in America. He produced art that advocated resistance to oppression. “I sculptured ‘Peace’ in the form of a projectile, to express the idea that if peace is to be preserved today it must be enforced peace-enforced by the democracies against Fascist barbarism. Modern warfare, which involves the bombing of women and children, has no counterpart in a peace interpreted by the conventional motif of olive branches and doves.” (O’Connor 1973).

Birth is something that every human goes through; thus, it serves as a commonality connecting us all across race, class, age, gender, etc. and reminding us of our shared humanity. Identity politics have fractured us. At this time we need to look to universals, and mothers/children/parenting are a universal that reminds us of life, which we can all relate to.

How the universe first came into being is one of the most profound and intriguing questions humans can contemplate, and we become mesmerized over again at other beginnings— the beginning of our sun, our planet, life on earth, and life in general. Human pregnancies and births are microcosmic parts of this macrocosmic cycle of coming into being. Similar to the awe we may feel when realizing that the births of our children are connected to a long lineage of births across human history, so we may feel an extraordinary fascination when thinking about the birth of our universe as a whole.

Our pregnancies and the births of our children are forever woven with coming into being and to the beginning of our universe, and that realization can help us feel interconnected to all life, lessening any sense we might have that we are on our own as we prepare to give birth ourselves.

*This is an excerpt from my new book, Visualizing Birth. For similar content, check out the publisher’s page. Book is available in softcover and hardcover.

I’m excited to announce that my new book “Visualizing Birth” is officially published! This is a short book with beautiful images that has roots in my PhD research on visualization and art in Chinese religious traditions, in my own experience using visualization during birth, and in years of reading about visualization across fields such as neuroscience, philosophy, and sports psychology. It’s also a celebration of 15 years writing this Visualizing Birth blog, which I started in 2010 during my second pregnancy when these ideas first took hold of me.

If you’re interested in the mind-body connection, birth, or the surprising science of mental imagery, the book is a great read. If you know someone who is pregnant, or works in the birth community (midwives, nurses, doulas, prenatal yoga instructors, acupuncturists, etc.), this is a lovely gift. Available in softcover, hardcover, and PDF.  

I’m so grateful for the beautiful cover design by my dear friend, Vanessa Roland, and the back cover endorsements from Ann W. Duncan, Alex Schlegel, Karlton Terry and Ogechukwu Williams. Some of the amazing cover art includes the works of Wenji Billow Kate Hansen Shauna Wiley-Naefke and Xiaohong Zhang. 

More info and to purchase here: https://www.blurb.com/b/12773676-visualizing-birth (softcover and PDF) and here: https://www.blurb.com/b/12773831-visualizing-birth (hardcover)