ABOUT Heather BeGaetz

Heather BeGaetz is an interdisciplinary artist, best known for giant hand crafted monumental sculptures of richly storied beings. As a queer mama, friend, partner, and devotee of the vast imagination of the earth, her artistic practice delights in conversing with the great dream. Through her work, she seeks deep relationality with everything from the animate forces of birth and death, to the oil in her gas tank & acrylic paints, to the shifting shorelines of the Willamette river whose waters quench the forest where she lives. Her pieces often become places of spontaneous performance and play, gathering people to arrive in place and possibility.

Her works have exhibited internationally at immersive art destinations, music festivals, venues, and public spaces. Notable recent showings include Morton Arboretum, Area 15 (Riyadh & Las Vegas), Orion Amphitheater, and Electric Forest.

Raised in a radical fringe religion, her early life experiences of medical-neglect and cultural isolation in religious community that denied the reality of physical earthly existence and death, gave her a paradoxical longing for deep earth community and the wisdom of mortality. Her artistic work is rooted in ardent connection with the natural world and its many cycles of life and death. She considers some of her greatest teachers to have been been close encounters with wildlife, icebergs, storms, and the buried histories of underground rivers. 

Collaborating is her love language, and she married one of her favorite collaborators, Fez BeGaetz, who she often create sculptures with. Gestating, birthing, and raising a human being deeply informs her work, and her daughter Calliope and her generation are always close to her heart as she designs pieces to remind us that we are co-creators in a magical perilous world.

In addition to her work in the field of large scale installation, theater, and immersive experience, she has created numerous participatory community arts projects. These include a weekly dance party (which ran for nearly a decade), a community choir, village theater improv sessions, and community sculpting parties. She imagines a sane culture where all people are remembered as participants with a creative obligation to help remake the world in collaboration with previous generations and those on their way in. Her creative career ahead will include many more invitations to participatory art in conjunction with large scale sculpture making.