I've been thinking a lot lately about the difference between making work and understanding why you make it.

For most of my life, making has come naturally to me. Understanding it has taken considerably longer.

I’m four quarters into Graduate school and it has forced me to spend more time in that uncomfortable space between those two things. I'm making, reading, traveling, writing, looking at art, talking about art, and then returning to the studio to see what, if anything, has changed.

What has surprised me is how often seemingly unrelated projects begin circling the same questions.

Inner Space started with my fascination with forms that could exist equally under a microscope or through a telescope. I liked not knowing whether I was looking inward or outward.

The Aura Cards came from a very different place. Traveling through Berlin, Vienna, and Venice, I became interested in postcards as tiny containers for experience. These objects that attempt to hold onto a place even as the experience of being there is already becoming memory.

And lately, Consensus has led me somewhere else again: toward questions about value. Who decides that something matters? When does an object become art? How many people have to believe something before belief begins to resemble fact?

On the surface, these projects don't have much in common.

But I'm beginning to wonder if they're all asking versions of the same question:

How do we decide what something means?

Maybe that's why I keep making things that hover somewhere between recognizable and uncertain. Cells become planets. Memories become objects. Paintings become data. Personal experiences pass through systems designed to categorize them.

I'm becoming less interested in providing answers.

I'm much more interested in constructing situations where certainty becomes slightly unstable.

I don't know exactly where that leads yet.

For once, I'm trying not to decide too quickly.

— Kat