Psyche Holding Her Core
Brianna Blanchard
january 9th, 2026
Major: Environmental Public Health
Genre/Medium: Graphite pencil, white conté pencil, charcoal, and acrylic paint on heavyweight sketch paper.
About thee work:
“Psyche Holding Her Core” is a grayscale mixed-media drawing created with graphite pencil, white conté pencil, charcoal, and acrylic paint mediums on a heavyweight piece of sketching paper. This portrait reimagines the goddess Psyche as a sculpture before her immortality, in a form that is still vulnerable and still human. I wanted to depict her as a stone bust to represent the same timeless weight that ancient artifacts carry, similarly to the ancient origins of the asteroid the Psyche Mission is seeking. The observant and gentle way she holds the asteroid echoes her own search for inner truth along with humanity’s desire to better understand the unknown.
Diving deeper into the symbolism within the piece, Psyche’s name in Greek mythology quite literally means soul. In both myth and mission, Psyche is a story about searching inward toward the “soul” of what potentially was once whole, and both mirror one another in their respective journeys. Each of the trials the goddess endures are both seemingly impossible but necessary for her own self-discovery. At the same time, the NASA Psyche mission is on a trajectory to an asteroid believed to be the exposed partial core of an early planet that never fully formed. Even more similarly, it has great potential to teach us new things about our own world.
While the butterfly in her hair symbolizes the wings she gains after her transformation (with butterflies also representing souls in Greek mythology), her pearl necklace speaks as a metaphor to how beautiful things can come as a result of pressure and perseverance. By having one shoulder covered and the other exposed, her asymmetric drapery reflects the balance between resilience and vulnerability that can come as a result of taking risks. Overall, I wanted this piece to convey the message that exploration is an emotional endeavor as much as it is a scientific one. Plus, I strongly believe that care and curiosity sit at the heart of the many reasons humans explore outwards in the first place.
In terms of the creative process itself, while I usually work with colorful acrylic paints, I wanted to challenge myself to return to my earliest artistic roots (being drawing with graphite and charcoal). Focusing on this medium again meant that I had to work within the constraint of creating a black-and-white piece, which pushed me to rediscover foundational techniques I hadn’t used in quite some time. Most excitingly though, is that this process reconnected me with how I learned to create art in the first place (through observing, sketching, and shading a variety of still forms).
Ultimately, the names we give missions matter. They carry stories about what motivates us to search and what we hope to discover. These themes create the bridge that enables this piece to hold both narratives of myth and mission alike, even though each follows a different path in its own journey toward insight. Though one may be guided through legend and another guided through science, both are undeniably shaped by the same emotional sense of longing.
Together, they remind us that to seek the soul of a person or a universe is an act of both knowledge and devotion.
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