WHAT MOVES AMANDA NORGAARD

WRITER

FOUNDER OF ILLUMINATION

The moment beauty arrives uninvited, and the life that becomes possible if you let it stay

AMANDA NORGAARD

Amanda Norgaard calls from Costa Rica, speaking from somewhere in the jungle. The connection drops once. When she returns, she picks up mid-sentence as though nothing interrupted her. That quality, the refusal to be derailed, is everywhere in her work, in her thinking, in the way she laughs at herself when a question opens too many doors at once. She writes. She teaches. She founded Illumination, a creative house she describes as home to everything that interests her, a portal of seasonal studios, mystical retreats, and mentorships designed to ignite creative expression. Her Substack is titled What Moves Me. The question is not rhetorical. She returns to it the way a musician returns to a motif. She is Danish. She grew up in a house full of art, music, and books. Her father is a film producer; her mother an academic. She was at the opera at three years old, and taught herself to read at four. “I was always so introverted and in my own world,” she says. “But I was also encouraged to do that.” Her childhood room was covered in quotes and images – portals, she calls them now. Her adult home, in whatever country she’s living in, contains the same things. Feathers. Stones. A print of Hilma af Klint on the wall beside the bed. Her mother visited for her birthday this year. Amanda asked her something she’d never thought to ask before: what was I like as a child? The answer stopped her. “She said, Amanda, you were exactly like you are now. You would stand by the window, looking at people for hours. You would talk to all the butterflies. You would find feathers and stones and be so amused with every single thing.”

The Yellow in the Tour Poster

For Amanda, inspiration is inseparable from sincere curiosity. “The more time we spend with anything,” she says, “whether it’s a feather or a human being, the more inspiration we can draw from it.” What moves her is not the outcome, but the story beneath the outcome. She watched a documentary about Diane von Furstenberg and says it changed her, “not because I’m interested in making clothes, but because I’m interested in what the pain was, what the source was, the origin of her inspiration that was being birthed into this product.” She draws from rap to write poetry. She goes through 1970s tour posters looking for a yellow that opens something. She calls it cross-world inspiration: “I take not the actual thing, but the quality of one world into another world, and then create a new world.” She is wary of like-mindedness. “We don’t need more similar minds,” she says. “We need to be inspired by other minds, other perspectives, other ways of doing things. And that doesn’t mean we do the exact same thing. We might just learn something. How cool is that?” She mentions the word interested and its etymology: inter-esse, to be in between. “To be interested in the world is to be in a space in between. And what happens in that space? You learn something new. More life.”

The bitch to my face

She is wary of the word authenticity. Not the thing itself, which she believes in fiercely, but in what the culture has done to it.

“Authenticity becomes a commodity. We see someone who feels authentic, and then we think, oh, this is what I have to be. Rather than the invitation being: who am I? We want a protocol. A solution to what authentic is, rather than experiencing it.”

Authenticity, in her understanding, is not always agreeable. It is not always warm. It is not, she points out dryly, the thing that happens when a room full of people call each other sisters, and then leave and behave otherwise. “I’d rather you be a bitch to my face. Tell me how you feel, show me who you are.” She created Illumination, in part, as a refusal of what she’d found in certain spiritual communities, the way sweetness can be worn as a mask, the way the performance of openness can close everything down. What she is after is harder and rarer: the quality that “doesn’t have to manifest itself all the time. It is a quality that moves in you, that is as close to you as your own breath.”

The Scent of a Long-Lost World

She makes a distinction that most conversations about beauty don't bother with: beauty and creativity are not the same thing.

“Creativity burns more like a fire in me, and beauty is something that i feel in me when I really touch the core of it . it's this very specific quality that is so ancient, and so sacred, that it makes me lose my breath. It’s like sandalwood oil, the scent of some long-lost world that I can’t even fully describe, but there’s something so ancient, so sacred… I gasp.”

She says creativity is "the midwife into the space of beauty." And beauty, once arrived, nurtures creativity back alive. They dance. They are not one and the same, but they are, she says, "making love. And reminding us to make love. Radical love. In service to love." Beauty, then, is not what it looks like. It is not the curated, the sanitised, the fine-lined, the conditioned; all of which, Amanda says flatly, move her nothing. What she is pointing at is something she calls a touch with origin quality: “A quality that is felt.” It doesn’t require a specific form. It requires only truth.

Take Yourself Fully

She is suspicious of the spiritual-industrial complex’s instinct to fix. “The most mending,” she says, “is when we go into a process of creation and it’s kind of working itself out.” The ego, the limitation, the wound; these are not obstacles to the work. They are, sometimes, the source of the work. “If we didn’t have these limitations, we wouldn’t know what walls to push through, or what doors to walk through.” A friend’s phrase stopped her: to let myself fully go, I had to take myself fully. . She returns to this often. “Instead of seeing, oh, here is something I have to get rid of, …take it in. Take yourself fully, with all of it, with all the shit, with all the limiting beliefs, with all the shadows. And then in that, there is a letting go.” She makes a point that deserves sitting with: “We can’t fix a mental pattern with the same mentality. A force greater than what created the pattern must be present, and that is something we can find through creation. Through beauty.” Not because beauty is a therapy, but because beauty leads us back toward something sacred and larger than the loop we are in.

“There are certain things that we grieve so hard that we’re not supposed to get over but that we’re supposed to live with. And this grief is one of the greatest sources of beauty.”

The Merge

We ask her what tension she holds, two things she believes in that haven’t resolved. She considers this seriously. “The merge,” she says finally. The merge into the totality of something; a relationship, a work, a greater field, while still remaining a totality yourself. Where does merging end and self-eradication begin? She has been, in the past, someone who thought she was merging when she was disappearing. “I thought I was merging with something, but I was self-eradicating.” And then the counter-question, which she finds equally fascinating: if she must have a self in order to eradicate it, what exactly is that self pushing back against? “It’s an ever-experiment,” she says. “I contemplate it a lot. And I don’t have the answer to it. And I’m unsure if I ever really will.”

Undying Beauty

The last thing we ask about is ugliness. What is her relationship to it?

She loves the question. “So much of what’s presented to us as beauty, I find soulless. I find it’s been hijacked. It moves me nothing.” The ugly, on the other hand, what we have been taught and schooled to call ugly, “is sometimes some of the most beautiful things. Think about birth. Raw, messy. But that’s coming back to the fact that beauty is not what something looks like but whether it gets us closer to something true.” She has found the most beauty, she says, by investigating the things she once categorised as ugly in herself, in forms she had dismissed. “When I became, again, curious, asking questions, and let that force move me, I found in that, undying beauty. Beauty of a whole other sort that I could not even have thought of, but could only have had an experience of.” A pause. “So I think ugly, what we categorise as ugly, perhaps it holds the key. Perhaps what we think of as ugly actually holds the key to some of the most outstanding beauty there is.”

The interview ends with chaos. Specifically with chaos as code to creation, a phrase from her work that came up near the close. She said it very simply: “Chaos and creation share the same breath.” Then she laughed, and said she needed to start a podcast. Then she was gone, back into the jungle, back into whatever she is working on next.

Photography by Caroline Berner KÜHL & Madeleine Carstensen

Published by World Beauty Forum, 2026

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