Everything We Do Is Art

Orbit Kinetic Ring. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/ASU/Monica Moreno — Psyche Inspired

I am an interdisciplinary artist and a teaching artist. As an interdisciplinary artist, I work across multiple mediums rather than within a single discipline. My practice includes sculpture, metalsmithing, jewelry, sound, installation, and performance. As a teaching artist, I bring creative practice into educational and community spaces, using art as a tool for engagement, introspection, and exploration.

Since I was a little girl, I have felt that art is inherent in everything humans do. I sensed that discovery, experimentation, structure, and imagination were shared languages between painters, doctors, mothers, sculptors, engineers, cooks, dancers, construction laborers, and especially scientists. I simply did not yet have the vocabulary to articulate that belief.

Then, in 2019–2020, I was a NASA Psyche Inspired — Cobalt Class intern while I was a student at Pasadena City College. At the time, I was deeply focused on the Metalsmithing and Jewelry Making program while also exploring other areas of study that supported my evolving artistic practice.

Vision. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/ASU/Monica Moreno — Psyche Inspired

Before the internship, I had no relationship to NASA-related work or the sciences. I did not consider myself someone deeply or traditionally studied in scientific fields, although the sciences were an interest that I never got the courage to pursue. The NASA Psyche Inspired program drew me in because I wanted to hear scientists and engineers speak about their work. I wanted to listen closely and see if they would express what I had always intuitively felt — that art lives inside science, which would also validate my feelings that it lives in everything we do.

What fascinated me during my time in the program was not only the research itself, but the humans conducting it. I was deeply interested in their lives — who they were beyond their titles, what practices sustained them, and what hobbies and creative outlets they carried alongside their scientific work. I was especially moved to learn that some of them drew, sketched, or created graphics as part of how they worked through ideas and because their work inspired them to do so. Their inherent impulse to create and their sense of wonder were palpable.

Layers. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/ASU/Monica Moreno — Psyche Inspired

Their curiosity was not mechanical; it was alive, personal, and expansive. What struck me most was the courage it takes to explore — to ask questions no one can yet answer, to devote years to the unknown, and to take risks in pursuit of discovery. In them, I saw the human heart of science, and it confirmed for me that exploration is as much an artistic act as it is a scientific one.

Listening to those working on a NASA mission speak about curiosity, problem-solving, experimentation, failure, precision, and wonder gave me language for what I had believed all along. I began to see parallels between shaping metal and shaping hypotheses, between constructing an installation and constructing a spacecraft component.

Magnetic Field. Image credit: Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/ASU/Monica Moreno — Psyche Inspired

The experience strengthened me as an artist. It affirmed that traditional art making and science are not opposites but reflections of the same human impulse: the desire to explore, to express, to give, to understand, and to give form to the unknown.

By Monica Moreno, Artist and former NASA Psyche Inspired Intern (Cobalt Class: 2019–2020)

To learn more about the Psyche Inspired program, please visit https://psyche.ssl.berkeley.edu/get-involved/psyche-inspired/