Spring means art season.

Many of us are applying to shows and galleries, building new bodies of work for the year ahead—carrying lessons from last season, anticipation of seeing familiar faces, and the quiet excitement of meeting new ones.

As I shift into production mode, this year feels entirely different.

My relationship to work has changed profoundly over the past decade. As a recovering workaholic—white-knuckling my way through C-PTSD and quietly emerging autoimmune conditions—I hit a wall a few years ago. What followed wasn’t a breakthrough, but a slow unraveling: learning to spin fewer plates, and then fewer still.

And when your identity is wrapped up in what you do, what happens when you can only do what is essential?

I’ve been returning to a line from The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry:

“What is essential is invisible to the eye.”

How many of us are quietly organized around the belief that our worth is measured by what we produce? By how useful we are, how well we perform, how much we are needed—or loved—by others?

Is it more work? Better work? The right kind of work?

Will that finally make us feel secure in our place here?

Lately, my work has begun to circle a different idea: that what is essential is already within us.

That the sense of enduring love we crave doesn’t come from earning it externally, but from recognizing our own wholeness as it already exists.

Without fully realizing it, I’ve been creating forms that hold this tension—containers, hollow spaces, crossed circles. The cross, for me, has come to represent relationship: the meeting point between self and other. The circle, a symbol of unity, of completeness.

Together, they form something like a language I didn’t consciously set out to speak.

I’d love to say I knew exactly what I was doing all along—but the truth is, much of what I make arrives through a kind of unconscious abstraction. I only understand it once it’s already been made.

“What is essential is invisible” not only because it isn’t a physical thing—but because it is often hidden from us, too.

A wholeness we knew instinctively when we were young.

Something that is slowly taught out of us—so that we strive, and chase, and prove, and hunger, and never quite feel finished.

Invisible to the eye.

But still there.

Waiting to be remembered.

You are enough.

Until Next Time,

⟡ Katie