Women's Lifestyle September 16, 2026 0 Comments

Inside the Raw, Haunting Art of Mia Middleton: What No One Tells You About the Gut-Wrenching Battle to Conceive

Ever wonder how an artist turns pain into a haunting kind of magic? Mia Middleton sure did. Nestled in her Lisbon studio, this painter grappled with the grueling, twisted journey of trying to conceive—a process she describes as a “corrupted fairy tale.” But instead of letting the darkness swallow her whole, Middleton channeled that emotional labyrinth into her art, birthing a solo show called “Summoning Cleo.” It’s not just paintings hanging on walls; it’s like peering into the deep, surreal psychic struggle of a woman wrestling with faith, fragility, and the aching void of the unseen. Each canvas whispers the shadowy presence of Cleo—the child she longed for, summoned from the fragments of hope and despair. Intrigued by how art becomes a lifeline when everything else seems to fall apart? Dive into the captivating world Middleton crafted, where belief without certainty becomes the ultimate act of courage. LEARN MORE

4 min read

Mia Middleton knew for a long time that her future child would be named Cleo. The Lisbon painter and her partner decided on the name during the lengthy, and at times painful, period of trying to get pregnant. It was an “extremely slow, protracted process with a lot of dark twists and turns,” the artist tells Bazaar from her studio in Portugal. “A really corrupted fairy tale is what I call it now.”

During that time, Middleton turned to her art to cope. “When you’re going through something like that, only the most insistent images will break through, because you just have no energy to do anything else,” she says. The artist leveraged that tunnel vision to create the paintings in “Summoning Cleo,” her solo exhibition now on view at Roberts Projects in Los Angeles through October 24. The new works capture Middleton’s surreal psychic experience throughout the emotional process, showing shadowy scenes in which figures are caught mid-motion or familiar spaces morph into uncanny dreams. Collectively, the works orbit one central figure: Cleo, the unseen witness to Middleton’s interior world.

“ ‘Summoning Cleo’ felt so perfect for the show because that was really the locus of my life during the last few years, trying to process and, in some ways, summon something which is just so outside of your reach and that outscales you in your own fragility,” she says.

A monochromatic painting of a faceless child with short hair and a neutral expression, set against a gray background.

Paul Salveson

First Girl, 2026

A figure with outstretched arms floats against a dark, cloudy background.

Paul Salveson

Invocation, 2026

Middleton, 38, is best known for noir-tinged interiors and portraits brimming with suspense. For each show, she begins with “world-building,” starting from utter “emptiness,” she says. She invites her audience into full-scale environments, from ornate castles against a gloomy mountainscape to sharp spiders resting in delicate webs. These works often employ a monochromatic palette and demure, Gothic textures. In recent years, they’ve merited solo shows in Los Angeles, Sydney, London, and Hong Kong.

Middleton was first drawn to painting for the capacity it affords her to externalize her interior world. “I was disillusioned by other mediums because they weren’t able to take me into my personal wellspring, my personal voice, as deeply as painting can,” she says. “All my work before then had been commenting on the external world, whereas with painting I was inevitably so enmeshed.”

A group of people holding hands, facing away, against a dark background with muted pink and red tones.

Paul Salveson

Summoning Cleo, 2026

This externalization became a kind of manifestation when Middleton began facing challenges while trying to conceive. The works themselves started to function as a way for the artist to “summon” her child into existence at a time when she felt crushed by the world, when the system that was supposed to help her kept failing. Throughout the show, “there’s an idea of trying to invoke Cleo,” she explains. Middleton drew on 19th-century theater imagery to find subtle gestures she might employ in her paintings. The titular painting, for instance, features a group of people dancing across a stage hand in hand, a mild ghostliness indicating a slight but powerful sense of movement.

These small gestures represent the “little things,” such as braiding her hair or embroidering, that helped Middleton through the difficult period. “I have a good psychological toolkit for when I’m going through a hard time, but this was something else. It was so much more ontologically existential,” she says. That sense of crisis shows up in the works, many of which feel surprisingly eerie. For instance, Augury (2026) depicts a falling blue bird, accompanied on its descent by two giant blood drops. Meanwhile, Laeba Bride (Brigid’s Bed) (2026) leans more outright into dream territory, illustrating flower blooms sprouting from a bed against a blood-red background.

A dark background with a bed covered in colorful wildflowers and vines, creating an enchanting, ethereal atmosphere.

Paul Salveson

Laeba Bride (Brigid’s Bed), 2026

A dark painting featuring a flying bird with red droplets against a black background.

Paul Salveson

Augury, 2026

Though Middleton avoided a fully conceived image of Cleo in the show, she points to one painting that edges close to a complete conjuring. First Girl (2026) features a portrait of a woman, rendered in shimmering grayscale, whose face is partially blotched out by a flash of light. This ghostly portrait suggests transference or movement, as if we, the viewers, are watching the girl simultaneously appear and disappear on the canvas.

In many ways, “Summoning Cleo” feels like Middleton staging a séance for herself, a theatrical ceremony to welcome a new chapter of her life. Perhaps it was successful: By the time the show opened this month, Middleton and her partner were happily expecting. Now, the exhibition serves as a time capsule of sorts, a reflective ode to all the rituals that helped her persevere.

“So many of the works are circling this theme of how do you find meaning in fragments, where all the systems that you relied upon have failed, have fallen apart around you, and you’re rebuilding yourself from scratch,” she says. “What I’ve learned from this was that it was less about the content of my beliefs and more about the practice of believing without knowing—faith without sight.”