Babette Voets (1985) is a painter, performer, collaborator and art-based environmental educator living and working in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. She graduated from the Gerrit Rietveld Academy (2013) and recently finished her teaching degree at the Breitner Academy (2020). Voets started and traveled with different performance collectives and has shown work across Europe. She composed and taught in a variety of fields ranging from primary education to mental health institutions.
Within her art she focuses on issues surrounding social inclusion and awareness of the natural world within and around us. Babette believes we have become increasingly disconnected from our nature. So it is essential that we tune ourselves in again, for our own health and that of all the diverse forms of life on our planet. She wants to address and reflect on our relationship to the environment as we perceive and interact with it.
In her work process she takes her own disconnection to nature as a starting point and uses the city as her natural playground. She has become increasingly interested in the development of instinct within natural surroundings. She realises that this ancient knowledge has not been generationally passed on, especially by not living close with nature, but trusting that intuitively this is still present within. To unlock this she uses techniques including Mindfulness, visualizations, canceling out of senses, automatic writing. This in order to become more sensibly aware, able to collaborate with the environment and to be amazed and inspired by new inside.
The findings are documented in an almost scientific way using a variety of art disciplines: photo-and video mappings, sound recordings, drawings, paintings, note-taking, writing, movement and research about societal and ecological circumstances. By intertwining the ‘facts’ and personal experiences she creates her final performances and paintings. With which she hopes to evoke curiosity and make the unknown seen and create empathy for the ‘other’.
Next to her own work, Babette has done extensive research into the positive effects of experience- based art practices within nature education. She specializes and designs art-based environmental programs. In this interdisciplinary way of working the process of art is used to enhance sensory awareness and creative ability. To stimulate a reconnection to nature and to make an active change towards the environment possible.
