HEATHER BEGAETZ MULTI-MEDIA ARTIST

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MEET THE ARTIST

Heather Begaetz

listening

My artistic practice is first and foremost rooted in deep listening. I want to hear the natures around me, to know beings at their depths. I’m always wondering, “What’s it like to be that being? That person? That creature? What do they long for? What stokes their aliveness? What’s it like to be this drop of rain? A nudibranch? Crude oil?”

Art is where I get to really ask these questions, and whether the answers live quietly or more audibly in the work, they are there, in the art and in my own deepened my sense of what it is to be human.

I’m often surprised by what I learn about the characters who emerge in my sculptures, environments, and plays. My own ideas about the world are transformed, and my understandings deepened. I feel deeply alive in this process, where the vast many relationships making up everything show themselves to me in new ways and permit me to give them shape, voice, form.

I want to give people a taste of this restored relatedness through my art. I want people to walk onward with renewed wonder or curiosity about other beings and themselves.

Sanctuary

Art-making is my sanctuary, and creative collaboration is where I have always found belonging. I was raised in a radical religion which many regard as a cult, where, from the youngest age, I was taught to self indoctrinate, question the reality of most everything around me, and spiritually dissociate. While I was finding my way out of that culture as a youth, sorting out what I needed to leave behind, and what gifts I could carry with me, it was writers, musicians, film makers and artists whose beacons led me towards spaces, truths, and ideas that nourished and guided me. Because I felt profoundly culturally isolated from my peers as a child, I carried an ingrained expectation that I would either need to perform to belong or labor to be understood. I mostly opted for the latter, studying how to create spaces where genuine mutual recognition naturally revealed itself. The gift of feeling alien, other, from a young age, was that it cultivated a certain rigorous devotion to translating my inner experience into something that could be shared. I learned to make bridges, allowing us to cross over and meet each other, worlds where we could relate in ways I that might not happen elsewhere. 

I came to be a sculptor by a circuitous route after working and playing in other artistic realms until my late thirties. My mom and sister nurtured my creative nature, and I was always making things as a kid. Dollhouse furniture, clothing, elaborate mail art, mixed tape album liners, offerings to hang in trees. But my early artistic dedication was in theater. I studied human nature from inside many characters and stories as an actor, writer, and director for many years. The theater lives in my and everything I do. I will always think and create in story.

 

It is only in the last decade that I realized I was a visual artist. I really didn’t know I could draw or paint or sculpt, or that those medium would become essential to my sense of artistic direction.

 

Sanctuary

Art-making is my sanctuary, and creative collaboration is where I have always found belonging. I was raised in a radical religion which many regard as a cult, where, from the youngest age, I was taught to self indoctrinate, question the reality of most everything around me, and spiritually dissociate. While I was finding my way out of that culture as a youth, sorting out what I needed to leave behind, and what gifts I could carry with me, it was writers, musicians, film makers and artists whose beacons led me towards spaces, truths, and ideas that nourished and guided me. Because I felt profoundly culturally isolated from my peers as a child, I carried an ingrained expectation that I would either need to perform to belong or labor to be understood. I mostly opted for the latter, studying how to create spaces where genuine mutual recognition naturally revealed itself. The gift of feeling alien, other, from a young age, was that it cultivated a certain rigorous devotion to translating my inner experience into something that could be shared. I learned to make bridges, allowing us to cross over and meet each other, worlds where we could relate in ways I that might not happen elsewhere. 

I came to be a sculptor by a circuitous route after working and playing in other artistic realms until my late thirties. My mom and sister nurtured my creative nature, and I was always making things as a kid. Dollhouse furniture, clothing, elaborate mail art, mixed tape album liners, offerings to hang in trees. But my early artistic dedication was in theater. I studied human nature from inside many characters and stories as an actor, writer, and director for many years. The theater lives in my and everything I do. I will always think and create in story.

It is only in the last decade that I realized I was a visual artist. I really didn’t know I could draw or paint or sculpt, or that those medium would become essential to my sense of artistic direction.

 

the big art of partnership & a partnership in big art

I’d started making masks, and I loved feeling of a face take shape in my hands. I’d been creating interactive immersive installations at festivals for a time, and I wanted to find new ways to help people connect to themselves and each other in these spaces that were more visual and architectural as well as informed by ritual and story.

I was newly in love with Fez, who’d already made several large sculptures on his own. I wanted to walk further into his world and create with him there. Collaboration may be my most fluent love language. I was thrilled when he said yes to creating some works together. I designed an interactive art maze. I proposed making some giant creature masks to Fez, and we slowly made our way from this idea to Omah, our first collaborative sculpture. Together we developed a collaborative signature distinct from what either of us created on our own. He generously made space for me to come into my own as a designer and fabricator, as we found the ways that our visions and skills dovetail.

After making a few large sculptures, I started gathering notes on what big art, large sculptures like this really do, and what role they may have originally played in human cultures. I loved how accessible this art form is. I saw how people felt almost as if these pieces were theirs. They could claim them as their backdrop, stage, meeting place, contemplation spot, temple, altar, or crashpad. These weren’t art objects or the stuff of collectors. These were players in peoples’ lives.

I was also touched how the intensive process of creating each piece became an alchemical lab for me and my collaborators alike. Each piece had a momentum, a nature, a bundle of teachings which each of us would receive differently, but which also held an element of collective revelation.

the big art of partnership & a partnership in big art

I’d started making masks, and I loved feeling of a face take shape in my hands. I’d been creating interactive immersive installations at festivals for a time, and I wanted to find new ways to help people connect to themselves and each other in these spaces that were more visual and architectural as well as informed by ritual and story.

I was newly in love with Fez, who’d already made several large sculptures on his own. I wanted to walk further into his world and create with him there. Collaboration may be my most fluent love language. I was thrilled when he said yes to creating some works together. I designed an interactive art maze. I proposed making some giant creature masks to Fez, and we slowly made our way from this idea to Omah, our first collaborative sculpture. Together we developed a collaborative signature distinct from what either of us created on our own. He generously made space for me to come into my own as a designer and fabricator, as we found the ways that our visions and skills dovetail.

After making a few large sculptures, I started gathering notes on what big art, large sculptures like this really do, and what role they may have originally played in human cultures. I loved how accessible this art form is. I saw how people felt almost as if these pieces were theirs. They could claim them as their backdrop, stage, meeting place, contemplation spot, temple, altar, or crashpad. These weren’t art objects or the stuff of collectors. These were players in peoples’ lives.

I was also touched how the intensive process of creating each piece became an alchemical lab for me and my collaborators alike. Each piece had a momentum, a nature, a bundle of teachings which each of us would receive differently, but which also held an element of collective revelation.

queer mama artist

Becoming Calliope’s mother has remade me more as an artist than perhaps anything else in my life. Early in pregnancy, I wondered if I would be able to be as creatively active and focused with a child to care for, and I questioned if I could be a good mom if I wasn’t active as an artist. Growing, feeding, and caring for a tiny muse with the giant powers of new life has brought more creative insight, challenge, and enjoyment, than I could have imagined, and I can’t think of anything better to focus and organize my work than dedication to the generations coming into life. 

Many creative assignments have been riding me since pregnancy. I want to tell you all about them, but I’ll wait till they’re further along.

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2024 – HEATHER BEGAETZ MULTI-DISCIPLINARY ARTIST – ALL RIGHTS RESERVED – DRAGON’S GATE DESIGN –