Episode 9: Bella Milroy
Fiona Reilly, 2021
EPISODE TRANSCRIPT
Bella Milroy is an artist and writer who lives in her hometown of Chesterfield, Derbyshire. She works responsively through mediums of sculpture, drawings, photography, writing and text. She is also a portrait artist. Her work explores how we touch and make contact with the world around us, with the hand-held being of particular significance. She makes work about making work (and being disabled) and not being able to make work (and being disabled). She is interested in the duality of every-day existence, and how things can be both beautiful/painful, both interesting/dull. This process-based practice is fundamental to her as a disabled artist, utilising and working with the significant limits and demands of living with a chronic illness, all mixed in with the detritus of domesticity.
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She is continually motivated by concepts of public and private spaces, and where the sick and/or disabled body exists within them. These concerns find themselves emerging in many aspects of her work, particularly within the collaborative projects she engages with such as Soft Sanctuary, an ongoing programme commissioned by the Human Library Project for Sefton Libraries.
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You can find her most recent exhibited work in the show Present State Examinations hosted by Turf Projects.
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She is an Artistic Associate at Level Centre and Creator and Director of Mob-Shop .
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In 2015 she won the Birth Rites Collection Bi-Annual Award, part of which was her residency at the Women’s Art Library, based at Goldsmiths University of London, resulting project and solo show, File Under Female.
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She studied Fine Art (BA) at Nottingham Trent University 2010-2016.
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Part of her practice includes her work with the Royal College of Physician’s Patient and Carer Network since 2014. In this work she challenges the way doctors and patients interact with one another and the significance of this relationship to the picture of our overall health as individuals.
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Her favourite place to be is in the garden at home with her partner Jono, her dog Doris and her cat Grace.