visual artist
Bethany Vergonet is a visual artist working with film photography and ballpoint illustration. Her practice is grounded in slowness and attention — an interest in how images emerge when patience, rather than urgency, is allowed to lead. She is drawn to moments that resist clarity: scenes that hover between familiarity and unease.
Originally from the American Midwest, her photographic imagination took shape in the Pacific Northwest, where the idea of the American frontier still lingers — not as myth, but as atmosphere. It was there, in Portland and its surrounding landscapes, that her perspective shifted: toward fog, shadow, restraint, and the quiet psychological charge of place. That sensibility continues to inform her work, even as her physical location has changed.
Now based in the Netherlands, she works from a position of distance and observation. Moving between cultures has sharpened her attention to interiors, thresholds, and temporary spaces — rooms lived in briefly, landscapes passed through rather than claimed. These environments become vessels for mood, gesture, and residue.
She works primarily with analog tools, drawn to their resistance and unpredictability. Film grain, light leaks, scratches, and soft focus are not treated as flaws but as collaborators — evidence of time, touch, and process. Her ballpoint drawings follow a similar logic, built slowly through pressure and repetition.
Rather than constructing narratives, her images suggest states of being: waiting, closeness, dislocation, quiet tension. Memory functions not as nostalgia, but as something unstable and bodily — what distorts, what returns, what refuses resolution.
Her work does not ask to be decoded. It asks for presence, patience, and a willingness to remain with ambiguity.