What Are You Made Of? A Conversation with Katie Benn
There's a particular kind of courage in following a thread you can't fully explain — in trusting that the quiet pull or voice that wants to speak through you is worth following even when it doesn't yet make sense.
We sat down with artist Katie Benn – someone who's no stranger to this pull, and someone we've long admired for her ability to engage with the most tender aspects of the human experience in a playful way (so much so that we asked her to illustrate our class, What are you made of?) – to learn a bit more about her approach to living in relationship with what’s true, and how that’s led to a winding and wiggly path of her own.
Katie Benn is a multidisciplinary artist from San Francisco, currently living in southern Oregon. Inspired by all things magical and mysterious, dreamy, silly, and absurd, she explores themes relating to the human condition and her inner world. Her new book, The Alchemy of Melancholy, embraces darkness as an essential part of evolution and explores the notion of transformation — never a straight shot, always a winding road.
In this mini conversation, she talks about the throughline in her work, the courage it takes to follow what's emerging, her wiggly process, and what she's made of.
Your work spans genres and mediums — what do you see as the throughline of it all?
As an artist, author, and medium (and other things), I see the thread that runs through my work to be, at its most fundamental, an engagement with and a focused attention toward the inner world — seeking to identify deep within what is wanting a voice and bringing it forward into the waking world. Sometimes that voice is pure, sometimes that voice is convoluted and limited (a sign of humanness), sometimes that voice wants to play an instrument, paint, asks to write or desires to speak, and I'm interested in all of it. This includes the lightness within as well as what dwells in the shade. There is a balance in the awareness of both. I find my greatest sense of personal and creative freedom in the liminal space, the doorway made at the center of two overlapping circles — often the venn diagram of human and spirit.
If you could go back and chat with a younger version of yourself, what would she be most surprised/delighted that your wiggly path has unlocked?
If I could tell my younger self about where we are now she'd be most surprised and excited by the revelation that our life actually makes sense. I spent a lot of time when I was younger feeling like my life was a series of unfortunate events, bizarre dead ends and plot holes. She'd see now that, if you live as though everything can teach you something, maybe not everything happens for a reason, but life can unfold as though it does. There is meaning if we want there to be meaning.
Where does your courage to follow what's emerging come from?
An astrologer would probably say that my courage to follow this path is thanks to the major placements in my 5th house, as well as my Aries north node in the 12th house. I'd say more plainly though that my allegiance to my inner self and my inner world has grown to be very strong. When we listen inward, there are gifts that follow. At this point, it's as simple as sensing and following what feels true to me versus what feels false.
What are you made of? (silly answers only)
Stone fruits and a cassette tape recording of a dream.