Psyche Holding her Core
Brianna Blanchard
“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. Read more…
