I Carry The Forest Inside - batik on silk

Projects and exhibitions

WEAVINGS

I CARRY THE FOREST INSIDE
batik and eco print on silk

CHARACTERS IN SEARCH OF A VOICE
ceramic sound sculptures

MUTAFORMA
Papier-mâché sculptures

ERBARI
batik on silk

FOREST REVERIE
works on paper

CURSES, SPELLS AND OTHER MAGICS
duo show with Elisa Bertaglia (2024)

NOTES FROM ANOTHER WORLD
solo show (2023)

SITE SPECIFIC WORKS

PAPER SCULPTURES

Limited Editions

Inner Maps, 2025
Textile series
Available here

Rivedere la foresta, 2024
Limited Edition Print

Surreal Landscapes, 2023
Limited Edition of scarves

BEATRICE SPADEA
b.1995
Italy

Beatrice Spadea’s practice explores the intersections of imagination, perception, and memory, investigating how these dimensions shape our experience of the world. Her work moves through spaces where dream, fantasy, and poetry emerge, opening reflective and alternative perspectives.

Her earlier works engaged with shared natural and cosmic symbols, which formed the starting point of her research. Over time, her focus has shifted toward a sensory crisis and a growing estrangement from the natural world, and how this disconnection shapes inner life and perception. The forest often appears as a central presence, understood as both a physical and psychic space of renewal, coexistence, and resonance.

At the core of her current practice are textile works developed through batik-dyed silks and hand-assembled pieces on a loom. Through slow, process-based techniques, she explores themes of identity, transformation, and voice, allowing forms to frag- ment, shift, and reorganize. Ceramic sculptures and sound operate in dialogue with the textile works, extending the investigation of resonance and presence. Through these materials, she seeks to awaken perception and build an imaginary ecosystem where matter and sound reconnect us with the living world.

Solo

(2024)The Portal of Timeless Dreams, temporary public installation, Via Borgonuovo 1, Milan

(2023) Notes From Another World, solo show, Galleria Martina Corbetta, Giussano, MB

(2021) One Step Closer to the Sky, solo show JC Gallery Mayfair, London - England

Selected group exhibitions

(2025) Seamspells, Forci Art Foundation, Tenuta di Forci, Lucca, LU
(2025) Mondi Sottili, Studio DeTales, Milano, MI
(2024) Curses, Spells and Other Magics, di Elisa Bertaglia e Beatrice Spadea Galleria Marti- na Corbetta, Giussano, MB
(2022) Roots Of Day, group show, JC Gallery Mayfair , London - England
(2022) C.R.A.C. Crepe, Rotture, Alterazioni e Cicatrici, group show Artiglieria, Contemporary Art Center, Torino, TO

Awards

(2023) ArtPrize 2023, group show, Grand Rapids, Michigan, US
(2022) Combat Prize 13° Edition, group show, Museo Civico Giovanni Fattori, Livorno
(2021) Arte Laguna Prize 15° Edition, group show Arsenale, Venezia
(2020) Winner of Nice&Fair Contemporary Visions Paratissima, Torino

Residencies

(2025) Forci Art Foundation, Textile Art residency, Tenuta di Forci, Lucca

Education

(2015-2018) Bachelor’s Degree in Painting, Three-Year Program – Accademia di Belle Arti di Brera

Last Updated 04/02/2026

I Carry The Forest Inside, 2025,

batik and eco-print technique on pongee silk, 180x70 cm cad
view from inside the private church of Tenuta di Forci, Lucca, IT

During my residency at Forci Art Foundation, (Summer 2025) in the hills near Lucca, I worked on a piece that feels like a manifesto (I Carry The Forest Inside, 2025) a synthesis of the questions that have guided me over the past years. It consists of a series of silk fabrics made with the batik technique and eco-printing, where leaves and natural elements are imprinted onto the textile. Dyed with pigments from oak bark, pomegranate, onion and avocado peels gathered on site, the process is entirely natural, rooted in transformation and memory. A slow process tied to the rhythms of transformation that belong to the natural world.

Within the veils of silk, faint anthropomorphic figures emerge. Perhaps dryads, mythological spirits that dwell in trees and, in some tales, become them. The outlines of ovaries, vertebrae, and bones appear as if suspended in a landscape of metamorphosis. These are not fixed bodies: they are transitional forms, elusive, porous. They seem to exist in a state of becoming, resisting any clear definition. In this work, the imprint, once a faithful trace, like the image of a shroud, becomes something unstable and chaotic. The natural forms blur, overlap, and dissolve into one another. What remains is not a copy of the real, but its memory, a residue of presence transformed by time and process.

This work speaks of identity as multiplicity, of the possibility of embracing all one’s forms without the need to resolve them into a single image. Each figure dissolves into another; each layer of dye leaves a trace. What emerges is not a definitive image, but a living surface, one that holds together contradictions, fragments, and shifting states of being.

In a world that constantly asks us to simplify, to become recognizable and marketable, to fit into a defined category, choosing to remain ungraspable feels almost subversive. These silks attempt to inhabit that fragile space of resistance: the space where ambiguity is not a weakness, but a form of freedom.

Studio research and work in progress, Forci Art Foundation, Lucca, Summer 2025

This Land Has a Body, 2025

natural pigment tie-dye and graphite on Habotai silk, 450x140 cm, 2025,
view from the show at Tenuta di Forci, Lucca, IT

Building on the exploration of identity, fragmentation, and the act of intervention in the weavings, This Land Has a Body moves from the personal and visual to the territorial and relational. While previous works explored multiplicity through form and material, here the focus shifts to the land itself and to the presence of those who inhabit it.

This Land Has a Body reflects on the
idea that territory, like the human body, carries memory, wounds, and resistance. It is not an abstract space to be owned or reshaped, but a living presence inhabited by histories and relationships. The work questions the language through which we name transformation: words like regeneration or renewal often conceal acts of erasure, moments when care turns into control, when gestures of improvement disguise possession.

The piece was created using natural dyes, with oak bark collected on site and iron, and later drawn on with graphite. The surface bears traces of the earth. Here, the fabric becomes a skin that remem- bers.

In this piece, the earth reclaims its voice and its body. It resists abstraction, insisting on its materiality, on the fact that every land is already inhabited, already full of stories. What emerges is an account of power and displacement, tracing how land and its communities are continually overwritten and redefined.

Untitled (from an ongoing series), 2026
batik and eco-print technique on pongee silk