NATURLIGHEDER - NATURALITIES
(Text from Format Artspace)

Danish artist Amanda Betz has focused on the species and places in the forest that have moved her. In her journey, she has acknowledged that we must listen carefully to nature.

In Amanda Betz's first solo exhibition at Format Artspace, the artist seeks to get closer to the forest and the significance of plants to understand why they affect us on a sensory level and therefore infiltrate our everyday lives—from the food we consume to ornamentation in both architecture and clothing.

"We dress ourselves in nature but don't realize how it infiltrates our daily lives. Recognizing this requires presence and focus. This yearning to become one with nature. Almost breathing it all into our cells and this desire to melt together with the plant and be surrounded by leaves in a dense blanket is persistent,"
says Amanda Betz.

The exhibition is based on her childhood forest, Fanefjord Forest on Møn, where she has explored her own relationship with the forest and plant life. Why she is drawn to it and why it gives her peace. Why it frightens her.

For Amanda Betz, the idea of encountering the forest was romantic but became a paradox. The encounter was therefore both as a grown clumsy child who had to enter an unknown space and as a detective on a discovery. With both fear of the darkness, the corners of the pine trees, and walking alone in the forest.

After having to admit her ancestry as an incarnated city person, Betz decided, according to Nordic shamanism, to go on a forest walk. In her investigations, Betz chose to perform an outdoor sitting in the forest following the Nordic shamanistic tradition.

"The forest is both birth and death in one world. Sitting against a tree trunk and feeling its weight is a reminder of time. If one were a tree, perhaps it would be a simpler life. One doesn't feel the tree's fear. They stand firm and remain until they weather and provide the forest floor with nourishment for new species. This resonates within us," says Betz.

With a series of paper reliefs and graphic prints, Betz's works open small poetic windows that try to capture the experience of nature that Betz has had through her research for the project. With an interest in what nature's significance is for us humans, both on an emotional and practical level, Betz has tried to approach the forest and its species.

"Paper as a material has its own texture and natural materiality. It can be folded, cut, dissolved, gathered like the nature it comes from. In Betz's works, the paper is reunited with nature again and gets its own natural construction. The works can be seen as living plant beings, as poetic moments, or as anatomical constructions in paper, depending on what the viewer experiences," says the artist.

The exhibition "Naturalities" opens at Format on August 13 and runs until October 3. The exhibition's last week coincides with this year's Art Week Copenhagen, and in connection with the art week, there will be a special event at the gallery.

Amanda Betz is a trained architect and works in the field between art, design, and architecture. Paper has always been her preferred medium, and with it she experiments in the span between 2 and 3 dimensions. Amanda Betz has achieved both national and international recognition for her ability to capture great complexity in a simple object. Her works reflect fragments of architecture and a unique experimental approach to patterns and geometric constructions. She has previously exhibited at the Museum of Paper Art, Bakkehuset, at Kunstsalonen, and most recently at Officinet.