Bethany de Forest

Bethany de Forest (1966) works and lives in Amsterdam, the Netherlands and has been working as an artist and pinhole-photographer for about twenty years now.
During art school (Utrecht and Amsterdam, the Netherlands) Bethany started creating these diorama’s, which she then photographed. Her objective was to show a “realistic” and slight absurdist imaginary world, in which one can supposedly wander around. Creating the illusion that what we see is life-size,
an actual place we can visit.
With an ordinary camera the images remained too distant.
But with the pinhole camera she was able to capture this feeling.

Her inspiration stems from objects she may find or materials that appeal to her. The settings and ideas often come into being during the creation, due to and kind of action-reaction process. The final result frequently turnes out totally different then from the original beginning fase.
The images often have a faraway feel to them. There always seems to be an element of suspense present. A mysterious darkness, seemingly sweet sometimes but coming so close that even butterflies can bite.

Being a pinhole photographer Bethanyís view of the world is quite deformed.
Her everyday surroundings are looked at with a pinhole eye. Sugar cubes can be used to build a sugar palace, Meat looks like marble, vegetables form a jungle and chicken-feet are tree-trunks.

Bethany primarily works with ordinary materials. She uses candle wax to build an ice palace and colored candy for a colorful dollhouse, while thousands of sugar cubes are used to construct the King Frogís castle. She taught herself the skills of the tiffany technique to construct a church-like building, which she then covered with meat appearing as stained glass. A close-up perspective causes an unusual reality to emerge. The daily elements are hardly recognizable in these strange worlds. However, the inhabitants feel right at home. King Frog, rubber ducky, butterflies and bumblebees, fish, seahorses, shrimp and even the chicken leg all tell their own story. Seemingly appropriate in their surroundings.